First there was The Krankies and David Bowie.
Hot on their heels came Nick Drake singing with Chris De Burgh.
Now, I find a picture worse still than these abominations.
Jeffrey Archer and John Lennon.
It's 7th December 1963 and Archer, then 23 year old student in Oxford involved in Oxfam's 'Million Pounds For Hunger' campaign, has blagged his way in to see the Beatles and get them pictured putting coins in collection tins.
In keeping with what was already a pattern in his life (he'd given fake academic qualifications to get on his one-year university course just so he could say he'd 'been to Oxford'), Archer was heavily suspected of embezzlement after he bought a house with the 'commission' he said he earned from the Oxfam campaign. Oxfam said they never paid him any commission.
Sadly and oddly, no charges were brought. We had to wait nearly 40 years for the joy of seeing the crooked tory tosser incarcerated.
Even then, regrettably he wasn't being slammed up - in more ways than one - in a cell with an 18 stone gangster thug with a penchant for greaseless buggery. As he'd been doing before he was convicted, he was poncing about in the local theatre putting on plays.
Prison authorities said there was nothing untoward or privileged about this treatment. Yeah right, so I await Peter Sutcliffe's appointment as director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse.
His blagging, cheating and lying continued unabated. He published his prison diary (in doing so breaking prison rules) with details of his hardships - how he'd had to haggle for a battered old radio (even though prisoners are allowed radios sent in to them), how he had to dangle some wire out of his cell window as an aerial in order to hear Test Match Special (even though it was broadcast on Radio 4 Long Wave, so an aerial isn't needed).
Last year, seemingly on the advice of his old mate 'Sir' Mark Thatcher, he chucked $134,000 to Simon Mann to help finance the failed coup against Equatorial Guinea. When the whole plan went tits up, Archer referred enquiries about it to his lawyers who responded with a very carefully worded statement saying Archer had 'never met or communicated directly' with Simon Mann. Meaning; yes he did give him the money, but through an intermediary (the plot's instigator Ely Calil).
For all the brilliance of Paul McCartney's blistering set at Glastonbury last year - two-thirds Beatles, one-third solo stuff, almost entirely pre-1980 - just think if Lennon had been there doing the same thing. A great young band like McCartney's who make the music really live, breathe and kick. Help, Whatever Gets You Through The Night, everyone going mental. Across The Universe. I'm Only Sleeping. Closing the set with Tomorrow Never Knows. Final encore of Imagine, a hundred thousand people heads back singing every word as loud as they can, not a dry eye on stage or off.
But no, John is dead. Yet Archer walks.
I never met John Lennon. You never met John Lennon. But Jeffrey Twatting Archer did.
Whatever next in these twisted allegiances? How could it possibly get more confusing and unsettling? Footage of Margaret Thatcher, spliff in mouth, playing bass for Bob Marley? Hitler and Ghandi laughing, slapping each other's knees, sharing an intimate private joke?
I really can't take much more.
1 comment:
Doncha think Archer looks like a ventriloquist's puppet there?.....creepy.....
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