Comedian Tommy Smothers singing Give Peace a Chance with John and Yoko. Photograph: Gerry Deiter/AFP/Getty Images
If the world is finally saved from global warming - perhaps after Bono uses the vapour trail from his jet to write, "only fill the kettle with the exact amount of water you need for your cup of tea" in the sky above China - then it'll be John Lennon that we have to thank. It was Lennon, after all, who came up with the idea that celebrities could and should change the world.
In Give Peace a Song, a new documentary about the recording of Give Peace a Chance, there's footage of him explaining the principles that have informed all celebrity-led campaigns since. To summarise: he realised when he was in the Beatles that people are basically idiots who'll do whatever celebrities tell them, so why not tell them to stop shooting each other?
All right, he doesn't actually call his fans "idiots", but Give Peace a Song does reveal in his peace campaign an element of what you might call positive cynicism. To one interviewer who asks what good he's doing by constantly talking about peace, he counters by asking why Ford spend millions on advertising. This is the same reasoning that Bono or Madonna might use today. They have the ear and the eye of the media - so why not use it to promote something worthwhile?
One of the things evident in Give Peace a Song is that Lennon realises the ludicrousness of an ex-Beatle telling the world how to behave. It wasn't his fault that too many hippies had no sense of humour, or that the rock stars who followed in his footsteps believed their own hype. He did everything he could to prevent people setting him up as some kind of secular saint. For a start, he sang the song in his pyjamas. He recorded it as amateurishly as possible, complete with a choir of hangers-on and "drumming" that was just some bloke kicking a door. He even included verses which, if they weren't actually meaningless, certainly owed more to Spike Milligan and Edward Lear than they did to Gandhi.
Give Peace a Song shows the moment where it all started to go wrong. First you see Lennon recording the tune from his bed in a Montreal hotel room, yelping his way through it in his usual sardonic fashion. Then you see folkie Pete Seeger sanctimoniously cutting out everything except the chorus and singing it like it's the sermon on the mount. By the time you get to more recent versions of the song, like the one Sean Lennon organised against the first Gulf War, any trace of self-deprecation has been entirely removed.
With his mansion and his big white piano Lennon is often held up as the epitome of rock star hypocrisy, and maybe he was. But Give Peace a Song does at least reveal a trace of humility and self-awareness which would be quite welcome from our rock stars now.
