Rock and roll Jesus

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

John Lennon killed religion for me. In truth, he saved me the bother of doing it myself. I had been sent to a Church of England primary school, a midweek church group and church-run Sunday school, maybe hoping for the best. But when Dad leant in conspiratorially one teenage day and handed over Lennon's John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Lennon's first post-Beatles solo album, the world I had had built for me by other people – parents, school, church – crumbled. Like my own acerbic Toto, Lennon pulled back the curtain, but instead of a small man pulling levers, there was nothing. The destruction of religion left a hole where my soul should have been.

Raised on a baby boomer rock and roll diet, music was already as much a part of me as my parents' DNA. I don't remember, for example, hearing Sgt Pepper's for the first time; as much as I've just always known that the sky is blue, I’ve just always known that she's leaving home to meet a man from the motor trade, how many holes it takes to fill the House of Lords, and, of course, Henry the horse dances the waltz.

John Lennon turned me into a teenage sceptic. He created me by tearing me down, and he left my soul on fire, embers burning in the rubble. Lennon took a sledgehammer to the walls, but then stepped aside as something new, all brooding, righteous contempt, swaggered in with petrol canisters. The shock of the new arrived at the perfect time for a teenage boy searching dark corners for a music, a culture, a communion of his own.

Britpop, gyrating, menacing, often androgynous, fun, a mischievous nod to the peerless paternal music collection, a celebratory antidote to the dominant US grunge, a particularly miserable stodge of Americana that, as Stephen Patrick sang, gladiola swaying languidly from his jeans' back pocket, said nothing to me about my life. I watched ‘The Word’ in 1994, open-mouthed, as the Grim Brothers, standing wilfully stock-still, glaring straight at me down the East Lancs Road and directly into my wide eyes, created a new wall of noise like nothing I had ever heard before, and thought, 'So THIS is what music sounds like.' Definitely Maybe made us feel 10 feet tall: we might belong in the gutter, but hang on long enough and we'll flow into the wide open sea.

At the same time as Oasis were stamping me with a new take-no-prisoners attitude, the Boo Radleys were writing the manifesto. Martin Carr’s devastating declaration on Four Saints - I believe in love - meant to me an Eden more than a childhood of Bible stories and moralistic teachings. Laugh if you must, he dares us, laugh if you must. I don't care. I just don't care: a warning to an impressionable teenage boy building his moral kaleidoscope; a warning to mind the shrieking cynics and to kick back against the pricks that will surely come to shake his faith; an ideology with which to start rebuilding. Then, a call-to-arms, in Find the Answer Within. He really means it, too, looking us straight in the eye, daring us to disobey: The world is at your feet. Try and make something happen. A get-your-stupid-arse-out-of-bed-and-do-something-spectacular shotgun blast that shook a working class boy from Merseyside into full self-consciousness; sitting on the banks of the Mersey in the dull dawn light, with every repeated Walkman play the Boo Radleys rebuilding in their own image what John Lennon tore down, watching cargo ships steam past towards the Irish sea and into the waiting world and everything in it, everything in it.

There was no room for God here, nor room for doubt or loss of nerve. Over time, relationships let me down, books and films delivered hollow promises, a succession of jobs left me adrift. Decisions were made, without apology, based simply on wether the outcome would hold The Jam’s voraciously capitalist Burning Sky at bay, or whether The Libertines would give their blessings. No heavenly influence could ever hold rank more than when Hope of the States demanded Stand up, be counted, no-one’s buying me, and Keep your friends close; your enemies won't matter in the end. In the paranoia and fury of the 2003 Iraq War, Conor Oberst’s quiet pacifist denunciation in There’s boys playing guns in the street, one's pointing his tree branch at me, so I put my hands up, say 'enough is enough', if you walk away I'll walk away, and Matt Bellamy pleading It’s time we saw a miracle was everything I needed to know about where right and wrong lay. I became an committed atheist searching for redemption in God’s kingdom, but the closest I’ll ever get to heaven now is by injecting Spiritualized into my broken heart and letting their angels take me.

And while my Dad had Beatles and the Stones and Paul Simon, Neil Young is mine, reclaimed and remoulded as a sage for our terrifying new world, a messenger from previous turmoil, whispering the wisdom of Zues in our ear, bullwhip lashes on his back still weeping. Sure, tattoo Hey hey, my my onto my skin for cavalier in approach and courage in dark times, but the scripture for the age is tattooed into the fabric of the new world: I join the multitudes. I raise my hand in peace. I never bow to the laws of the thought police. I take a holy vow to never kill again.

And now. Pushing 40. The kaleidoscope still turns, each year erupting into new cosmic colours. The Boos and the rest still unconsciously influence every decision. The scepticism Lennon taught me still keeps me on the straight and the narrow. But...but...The fires fuelled by rock and roll still burn with a furious intensity but, in these older, greyer days, choices taken are now more often in wisdom and not anymore in furious righteousness, and when that happens I struggle to ignore the idealistic disappointment from down the decades. But, then, as John said, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. 

Amen to that, Brother.