March 3rd, 1990. The same day the Liverpool Echo ran the headline FURY OVER LENNON SONG SLUR – BAND’S TASTELESS ATTACK ON JOHN & PAUL, taking aim at us for our version of Lennon’s Imagine — the one where we sang that maybe Macca deserved a bullet too. It was pure piss-taking, punk provocation in the classic style, but to the Scouse press we’d desecrated their holy shrine.
The timing couldn’t have been worse: that night we were booked to play in Birkenhead, across the water from Lennon’s city. Cumi was bricking it. He tried to pull a Paul Puke manoeuvre, claiming, “I’m going away this weekend, so I can’t do the gig.” Truth was, he didn’t fancy facing a mob of irate Beatles disciples. To be fair, I had my own doubts. If we were going to get our heads kicked in for slagging off the Lord Lennon, then so be it — but it would’ve made a hell of a story for Crud.
When I told Cumi we’d do it without him if necessary, he backed down. He wasn’t about to let 4Q march into Birkenhead minus its frontman.
We rolled up at the Golden Fleece to find the place rammed — not with outraged Beatles fanatics but with punks. Proper punks. The room was so small they stood only inches from our faces. A couple we recognised from Planet X were there too, members of the band Go Heads, grinning like they’d come for blood but stayed for the fun. Even the landlord was in on it: he knew our parody lyrics to Imagine word for word. Instead of hostility, the scandal had done its job — it pulled people in.
We let fly with a longer set than usual: LSD, I Hate TV, Mental Asylum, Bat Gooch, Nein Werk, Video Party, Poo On My Shoe, Burn in Hell, We Want You, Imagine, 4Q Blues. The room shook, punks yelling back every line, bodies pressed against us. When the landlord himself starts singing along to your blasphemous Lennon send-up, you know you’ve won the night.
The crowd wouldn’t let us go, so we encored with Stand By Me and VD, then ended with a cut-down reprise of Bat Gooch — rechristened Bat Goo after we hacked it to pieces. By that point it hardly mattered; the atmosphere carried us.
The moment that still makes me laugh, though, was the little old lady who shuffled to the front mid-set, wrinkled brow, politely asking if we could “turn it down a bit, because I can’t hear myself think.” God knows how she ended up in the Golden Fleece that night, surrounded by 100 punks and a band tearing Lennon’s memory to shreds, but there she was — the most surreal critic of all.
In the end, no fists flew, no bottles were hurled. We didn’t get lynched for mocking Lennon. Instead, we played one of our tightest, most electric gigs. What the Echo called a slur turned into the best publicity we could’ve hoped for. The cult of Lennon survived unscathed. 4Q, on the other hand, walked out bigger than we’d walked in.
