The funny thing about art is that, in the right context, almost anything can be strangely affecting. A pile of bricks on a building site is a pile of bricks. But put them in the Tate Gallery and suddenly you find yourself looking, pausing and reflecting in a way you never would otherwise.
Which is why I'm not surprised to hear of the success of the new Imagine tour - the travels of the upright, brown piano on which John Lennon wrote one of the most famous songs ever. The organisers say people have travelled many miles to see the piano and the reaction has been universally positive. If you read the news today (oh boy) in the Guardian, you'd have indeed seen that a crowd of people stood and stared - their arms folded, in quiet, reverent contemplation. The locations have been carefully chosen, all of them sites of extreme violence, from Dealey Plaza, where John F Kennedy was assassinated to, later this week, Oklahoma City, where a terrorist bomb killed 168 people in 1995 - places where, the organisers hope, the message of Imagine most resonates.
But it's there, in the song's message, that lies the problem, or rather the inherent limitation of this project. As a fan since childhood of John Lennon, I'll be the first to argue that he wrote many potent, provocative songs with lyrics that still stir even four decades later (Just listen to God or Working Class Hero or countless others). But while Imagine has become Lennon's best-known song, it is very, very far from being his best. Maybe it's the endless repetition, thanks to a thousand of those All-Time Top 100 and Hall of Fame lists, but Imagine now sounds like a bit of a dirge, while the piano part seems to plod and plod.
Above all, the lyric has none of Lennon's usual bite or edge; it is instead a string of platitudes, more suited to the back of an adolescent exercise book. "Imagine there's no countries, It isn't hard to do..." It doesn't call for anything or discomfort anybody. It is, so uncharacteristic of Lennon, bland. Apparently the piano will make its way to Auschwitz and the site of the July 2005 bombings, (as well as, a tad incongruously, the Tower of London). I'm not sure what, besides empty pieties, this song has to say to those places.
An alternative exists, a Lennon anthem no less universal, with a hook line any crowd could sing along to. But it has a specific message, relevant to every international crisis where decision-makers are torn between dialogue and military action. So let's have the Give Peace a Chance tour. All we have to do is find the guitar John Lennon wrote it on.
