Fab 40 - John Lennon's Imagine (1971)

John Lennon's second solo album Imagine is 40 years old this month. Released on 9th September 1971 in the US and a month later in the UK, Imagine for many represents Lennon's best solo work, or at least second to the initial post-scream therapy album Plastic Ono Band released a year earlier.
Yet despite it being arguably his best, Imagine is by no means an easy album: Lennon covers a range of musical styles and subject matter as you're ruthlessly thrown from one side of his personality to another. The timeless title track opens proceedings but then you're thrown into the faux-country/bluegrass of the light-hearted Crippled Inside, then back again into sloppy ballad Jealous Guy, a song which dated back to Beatles times and would be covered so masterfully a decade later by Roxy Music.
Gimme Some Truth and I Don't Want to Be a Soldier again tackle political and pacifist themes, which would be his main preoccupations in the successive New York City album. There's more soul searching from primal-therapy in How? and It's So Hard and even time for an alleged dig at former bandmate Paul McCartney (later denied) in How Do You Sleep? The only really poor moment is the closing Oh Yoko!, a naive attempt at a sing-along tribute to his famous wife, but which works out an being about 2 minutes too long.
But put it all together and Imagine works - it's John Lennon all over. Fervent political activist one minute, clown the next; from angry young man to dedicated lover and husband, from world weary angst to profound introspection. Imagine, and Lennon, is all of this

The Imagine album also marked Lennon's - and Yoko's - transition from the UK to the USA, a place he would soon consider his artistic home. Initail tracks were recorded in his home in Ascot, and in part at Abbey Road, yet the album was completed in New York's Record Plant, with final production by Phil Spector. By September 1971 Lennon had left the UK with UK, never to return.

Although the title track became an immediate hit in the US, reaching number 3 in the Billboard 100,  amazingly it was not released as a single in the UK until 1975 to promote the Shaved Fish "best of" album, released to fill the gap after Lennon's famous retirement from the music scene. Its message of universal love has become the anthem for just about every single world peace cause that has existed since, and despite hundreds of cover versions and live performances, the simplicity and sincerity of Lennon's original has never been equalled.