Give peace a chance

A god-awful start to the weekend fortunately turned into a very good one. We spent the whole day yesterday with an old mate who is here this week with his work and on Saturday night we were lucky enough to get invited to the Lennon Peace Day Concert.

Little known, but John Lennon wrote his last ever album in Bermuda in 1980. After his son Sean was born, Lennon performed and wrote hardly any music as he concentrated on his family life in New York. Then in the summer of 1980, after being pretty much closeted in his Manhattan apartment for 5 years, Lennon felt the need for adventure and bought a small sail boat and with a crew sailed from the Newport, Rhode Island to Bermuda.

There is a wonderful article written here explaining that journey and how bad the crossing was, reinvigorating Lennon’s wonderful creativity and inspiring him to write the album “Double Fantasy”, named after a freesia of the same name, a flower that Lennon had observed in his daily visits with Sean to the Botanical Gardens in Bermuda.

Lennon spent 7 weeks in Bermuda enthusiastically writing songs for a new album. He returned to New York in late summer and “Double Fantasy” was released on November 17th, 1980, just two-and-a-half weeks before John Lennon was murdered.

Among the songs on that album were “Woman” and “(Just Like) Starting Over,” both recreated live along with a whole range of other Lennon and Beatles classics as well as a tribute to Bob Marley in the beautiful Botanical Gardens on Saturday night.

This was the second Peace Day Concert and local artists such as Heather Nova, Joy Barnum, Uzimon, Michelle Morfitt and the excellent Rachel Brown each performed followed by Biggie Irie and the Splash Band from Barbados, who mixed rock and reggae superbly getting everyone in the audience to their feet. The Beatles tribute band Fab Faux rounded things off with a stirring medley of songs to finish proceedings up around 1.30am.

I was very impressed with the organisation of the whole event, the odd expected technical glitch aside. There certainly wasn’t much they could do about the couple of rain showers, which threatened to ruin proceedings, but with us all in ponchos and knocking the red wine back, the rain didn’t have a chance and I would say roughly 2,000 people would have left humming all the way home.