7. John Lennon
I can’t, I don’t, play John Lennon on Radio 1 now. Plenty of other radio stations around the world would and do. I want to play stuff that’s new. I don’t switch off playing new music to play old music. I haven’t got time. There’s always that music out there you haven’t heard yet, and I feel guilty if I haven’t listened to it when I could have done. I’m very guilt-ridden anyway, about everything. Every time I play an old tune that I might love, like this one, I think: now you’re not listening to something that came in yesterday, but that that is your job, to listen and find the very best new music. I don’t have time to listen to old John Lennon albums.
When I put this list together, there’d just been a special on BBC Four – it would’ve been his eightieth birthday in 2020. They put a lot of his good stuff in this documentary, and ‘Steel And Glass’ stood out, reminded me how much I liked that period. It’s not what you would associate with him necessarily, but I like that period of his when he’d gone to New York, you know, The Beatles had broken up, and they all went in different directions. He being him, he could pick anyone in the world, of the best musicians – they’d all fall over themselves to come and play with him.
