Let Me Hear Your Balalaikas Ringing Out

Towards the end of the 70s, a group of us went off to Hong Kong on a holiday and John was in, sort of, house-husband mode and wanted to show Sean the world. And during one of our expeditions on the back streets a kid comes running up to him and says, “Are you John Lennon?” And he said, “No but I wish I had his money.” Which I promptly stole for myself. [imitating a fan] “Are you David Bowie?” No, but I wish I had his money. It’s brilliant. It was such a wonderful thing to say. The kid said, “Oh, sorry. Of course you aren’t,” and ran off. I thought, “This is the most effective device I’ve heard.” I was back in New York a couple of months later in Soho, downtown, and a voice pipes up in my ear, “Are you David Bowie?” And I said, “No, but I wish I had his money.” “You lying bastard. You wish you had my money.” It was John Lennon.

“He looked awful. I couldn’t get over it. Horrible. He had one eye open, and he just squawked all the time. They held him up and he looked like a piece of red meat. When I got home I cried, the first time for years and years. But the next day, he looked more human. He turned out a lovely baby in the end.”

Jack: Come on. I mean she is fun to talk to.

John: Yes. And you buy into her bullshit, because she seems to know all the right things to say. She knows names, she knows buzzwords, she knows certain cultural phrases that imply that she knows more than she does. The anxiety of influence, the Bartok string quartets, the perversion of dialectic la Sagrada Familia, the Gong-Tormented Sea.

Jack: So, what, I should press her and not let her get away with the name dropping?

John: But you didn’t.

Jack: Yeah, I mean, it’s sort of charming that she’s a con-artist.