1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 227. John Lennon – Imagine (1971)

The track Imagine gets so horribly overplayed and hyped it’s hard to judge it fairly, but actually listening on headphones, the simple but memorable piano riff is a lovely bit of delicate musicianship, even if the lyrics are, to be frank, a little bit trite if you think about them too hard. You can’t fault Lennon for the “why can’t we all just get along?” sentiments though. The iconic piano piece is played, by the way, by session musician Nicky Hopkins who is very likely to be the keyboards for nearly every of the Seventies albums in this list where the band doesn’t have a keyboardist of its own (and especially the UK/USA artists). Ex-Beatles pal George Harrison puts in a lot of guitar on the album too – listen out for his distinctive slide style.

Crippled Inside is a country-style little jaunt about why some people can’t just get along with others, while Jealous Guy sounds like a romantic song in terms of the music, but actually the lyrics are pretty abusive and controlling, essentially saying “you made me hurt you because you made me jealous”. Anti-war sentiments abound in Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier and the pleasingly rocky Gimme Some Truth, skewering "short-haired yellow-bellied sons of Tricky Dicky" and "tight-lipped condescending mommy's little chauvinists". Good thing we don’t have people like that around these days. Oh, wait.

The final track is a chirpy bop Oh Yoko, that slightly brings to mind Dylan’s I Want You (the harmonica at the end helps this perception), and although it’s a delightful little expression of Lennon’s clearly deeply felt love for his wife, it lacks the painful depths of feeling of the track God that closed his previous solo album. And that, I think, is a good summary of the differences between the first solo album and Imagine. This is not as raw and primal scream-y, being both more thoughtful and more musically polished, but that lack of pure emotion and vulnerability is what counts against it in the end, for me.