The John Lennon track "a failure of a song"

John Lennon was always known to be self-deprecating about his work. Throughout his time with The Beatles and into his solo career, Lennon knew when he had written unprecedented material and always put his hand up when he realised something was below par. Although Lennon may have thought differently about songs like ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ while he was in The Beatles, one of his solo tracks never quite came together for him.

When he first started his solo career, though, Lennon had the idea of getting as far away from his original sound as he possibly could. Becoming immersed in the avant-garde scene, the first official studio albums to feature Lennon’s name were the experimental projects with Yoko Ono, featuring random noises and avant-garde approaches to recording that would stand out as jarring noise to most of the public.

After the band broke up, Lennon’s immersion in primal scream therapy led to him making songs that were more open about his feelings, putting his soul into the grooves of albums like Plastic Ono Band. While the public embraced him on his massive album Imagine, things started to go south when he began making different pieces with Yoko Ono.

For the first time since their union, Some Time In New York City marked the first significant downslide in Lennon’s career, featuring songs that were kneecapped by ramshackle production or deliberate subversion of the genre with Yoko adding her trademark screaming technique to otherwise decent tracks
Seeing their presence in each other’s work as destructive, Lennon and Ono would eventually take a break from each other, leading to Lennon working on Mind Games. Informed by the loss of Ono, Lennon is still working out his emotions throughout the album, from the apology song ‘Aisumasen’ to rockers like ‘Meat City’.

Although the album is home to some beloved deep cuts from Lennon like ‘Bring on the Lucie’, ‘Only People’ never sat well with him once it was finished. Even though the tune benefits from some serene guitar playing and a handful of vivid lyrical images, Lennon thought that it never measured up to his usual standards.

When speaking about the song later, Lennon would consider the track one of his most underdeveloped endeavours, saying, “That was a failure of a song. It was a good lick, but I could never get the words to make sense. It had possibilities of being a good hit record, but I never got it to work. It just didn’t work.”

While Lennon wasn’t a fan of how the song played out, it’s easy to see where he’s coming from when looking at the rest of the album. Compared to some of the more fleshed-out tracks like ‘You Are Here’ and ‘Out the Blue’, there are certain sections of it where Lennon sounds lost, trying to put together the pieces of a song before finally making an assortment of different ideas stacked on top of each other.

Then again, this was only the first part of the separation between Lennon and Ono. Across the following albums, Walls and Bridges, fans would get a much deeper understanding of how harsh the separation began affecting Lennon.

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