I heard the inevitable piece on the radio this morning, oh boy. It’s 34 years since John Lennon, Beatle and champion of peace, was assassinated outside his New York home.

In a way, you’re almost glad that he didn’t live to see the ‘love, love, love’ message he spread throughout the 1960s end up face down in the gutter while extremism tramples over love’s almost comatose, vegetative state.

‘Everybody had a hard year’, he sang on The Beatles ‘I got a feeling’.

Yes. We’ve all had a hard year in the face of missing airliners, airliners shot out of the air, ISIL beheading videos, genocide in Palestine and whatever else you want to throw into the mix.

The world feels more dangerous now than I ever remember it. I imagine(!) that a 74 year old John Lennon would have been disgusted, and probably railing against Anglo-American involvement in the Middle East and, equally, speaking harshly about Islamic fundamentalism. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility to suggest that his words may possibly have seen a fatwa issued against him by some hate filled Imam.

Lennon’s legacy, however, remains. A man whose work is adored by millions, and will be adored by millions yet unborn.

It will outlive radicalism, extremism and fundamentalism.

No stranger to nudity, indeed a champion (along with Yoko Ono) of casual nudity, John was breaking down barriers in all sorts of ways. There were bed-ins, bagism, all to ‘give peace a chance’.

Dutch SL user Johannes is a fan, and thus has staged his own bed-in in memory of John, and to champion world peace. Sporting very realistic John Lennon hair and glasses, we see him (below) staging a bed-in for world peace (with Diane, our model, in the Yoko Ono role), as well as re-creating the cover of the ‘Two Virgins‘ album on which John & Yoko originally appeared nude in 1968.

 

Away from recreating the cover (‘It’s something I’ve always wanted to do in SL’, he enthuses), he also posed for us in a kind of conflation of periods in John Lennon’s life, at the Cavern Club sim, playing a Vox Continental, as he did at the Beatles Shea Stadium gig, while wearing a Sergeant Pepper suit.

We owe it to the man, and his legacy, to ensure that 2015 is the year we ‘give peace a chance’.

Ella.