Happy Christmas Yoko

We are just a week or so away from what would have been John Lennon's 70th birthday and so you would have thought that the Lennon Estate would be offering up something for the fans, some celebratory morsel that we could feed on whilst reminiscing about the joy and sadness that his life and works gave to us.

For me the Walls and Bridges album occupies a time and space in my life that I don't want to revisit whilst at the same time acknowledging that it changed me as a person beyond the normal platitudinous offerings.

So what have we been offered then? Well the "Signature Box" is what it is called, it consists of 11 remastered albums, an EP of non-album singles and a book of rare photographs, poetry and essays, it can be yours for just £129 of your English pounds or approx. £15 more than if you purchased the albums singularly, assuming of course you don't already own them in multiple formats. So what's the problem you ask. Well the problem is that this is Lennon as produced by Disney, it's the smooth without the rough, the top half of the Double Decker without the bottom, the Blair years without the Thatcher legacy, Bob Paisley without Bill Shankly, it's a sham.

Isn't part of an appreciation of an artists work the acknowledgment that not everything is good and worthy? It is of course possible to like an artist without being aware of his other work, for example people like Picasso's Guernica without having much regard for his two tits on a head phase but this is called Signature Box, not Selection Box or The Bits We Thought You Would Like Box. The omissions aren't just the early solo work, the avant garde period, the so-called 'difficult' work, there are later offerings that are no longer on offer. So we don't get Two Virgins, The Wedding Album, both Life With The Lions albums, we don't get Live Peace in Toronto, or Shaved Fish, or Menlove Avenue, we get one disc of 'rarities.' It's bizarre, an insult to his memory and to his fans.

If you have the best part of £130 to spend this month of CD's you could buy the new albums by The Manics, Grinderman, Eels, Robert Plant and still have ninety quid left, alternatively you could put another £30 in the kitty and buy the 'Next Stop is Vietnam' anthology, more than 300 tracks covering the years 1961-2008. This is a project that includes a 300 page booklet, recordings of public announcements, recordings of music by Vietnam Vets and takes in just about every artist who has recognised the involvement of the U.S in South East Asia over the period covered.