It seemed that out of the prison cell I escaped down some profound dark tunnel, honed out by the bombs and grenades that fell incessantly on the purgatorial landscape of my life. I could hear the groans of dimly seen fellow convicts as I groped my way along until eventually I emerged into a place of vast grassy vistas, mountains and blue sky. Then suddenly I came upon a grotto honed beneath a wall of rocks. Water trickled down from the ledges into a pool and a man sat cross-legged on the ground strumming a guitar and singing as if to himself. His hair had been tied at the back into a pony tail and he wore a kimono. Behind him a sign had been planted in the ground. “Wanna be a hero?” it asked. “Then just follow me.” An arrow underneath pointed in no particular direction.

The words of the song did not make sense. Suddenly their singer noticed me and stopped. “Hullo, kid,” he said with a wry grin. “Are you here for the long haul or just passing through?”

“I don’t know,” I replied and he averted his gaze back to the instrument. “What was that you were just singing about?” I asked.

He sang the line of gibberish again then added in English, “Nothing’s going to change my world” twice over. “It’s Sanskrit,” he said. That’s when I twigged who he was. “I’m just thanking the maharishi bloke who taught me to accept life absolutely as it is and adding the word om,” he continued. “You know what om is, kid?”

“Isn’t it supposed to be the sound of the universe?” I replied and he nodded. “I thought you hacked off the maharishi when you realised what an attention seeking phoney he was?”

“I don’t bear grudges against anyone, kid,” he retorted. “Not even Tricky Dicky. Nobody is perfect. Are they?”

“Why do you keep calling me kid?” I objected. “I hit sixty a few years ago.”

“Really? Lucky you!” he smiled and then just continued with the same melodic song. I had heard it before but to me it wasn’t one of the well known ones. The group had buried it away on a B side somewhere, I think. I suddenly felt parched and scooped up a handful of water from the crystal clear pool. It tasted cold and instantly refreshed my mouth. “You look as if you’ve been in the wars?” John asked. I nodded my head and then washed the grime off my burning face. “Be my guest and jump in,” he said. “There ain’t no charge in these parts.”

I decided against it. I didn’t have a towel and in any case the grotto seemed to be bottomless, hardly an enticing prospect for a non-swimmer. “Is this a dream, John?” I asked him. “That is your name, isn’t it? Or have you got a doppelganger?”

“Doppelgrunger? Isn’t that a German dog? What would I be doing with one of them?” he laughed. “Actually I used to have a puppy called Nigel when I was little. My uncle George gave him to me. You’ve just jogged my memory. I wonder if I could compose a song about him?” John suddenly became very focussed and started intermittently strumming again but with a different rhythm.

I assumed this all amounted to his way of acknowledging I’d matched the right name to the right person. “Is this a dream then or what?” I repeated my original question but he had become too engrossed in his own thoughts to hear. Chord patterns slowly materialised from the instrument and childish phrases from his mouth.

“Come on over and stroke my dog,” he sang. “He can bark for England and chew a log.” The tune rang a bell if not the doggerel, so to speak. “What do you think, kid? Got potential?” he asked.

“The tune sounds a bit like one of Shania Twain’s numbers,” I replied, evidently not to his liking.

“Who the fuck is that?” he snarled back. When I informed him her Come On Over album had been released in 1998 or thereabouts and sold ten million copies, he guffawed disdainfully, “I got gunned down eighteen years too early to earwig that one!” I hesitated to break his concentration after that. The muse seemed to be upon him and I felt unexpectedly proud that it was me who had accidentally prompted its appearance. The next two verses went, “He’s got short legs and a paunchy tum, He howls at the moon and eats Pedigree Chum. He must have fleas cos he likes to scratch, He’s got four eyebrows and his ears don’t match.” At which point he stopped strumming and turned to me. “I need a middle eight now. Any ideas?” I shook my head, unsure what he meant. “A change of musical direction,” he explained. “A harmonic progression. What did that Shania person do?” I couldn’t remember. “Not that I would want to steal from her,” he added with a conspiratorial wink.

After a few more strums John put his guitar down as if suddenly bored with the project. “I’ll come back to it later maybe,’ he muttered.

“At least I can help you with a title,” I tried to encourage him and he twisted his head expectantly. “A Dog In The Life?” I suggested.

He gave me an old fashioned look. “So the song would end with a huge cacophony like the universe imploding on itself?” he asked sarcastically.

“No, with a Yorkshire terrier joyfully yapping as if it had just been given a bone,” I quipped back.

He evidently didn’t like being outquipped and became aggressive. “Are you here from the NME trying to get a scoop?” he accused me suspiciously. I shook my head. “The Melody Maker? The News of the Screws?”

“I can promise you hand on heart I am not a journalist,” I said and his shoulders noticeably relaxed. “However, I am a fan – or rather used to be – and I would love to ask you some questions purely out of my own interest. Obviously I promise to respect your confidentiality.”

“Go on then, kid, fire away,” John smirked. “I haven’t talked to a fan for literally decades.”

“Well, your life and stuff has received a lot of critical attention,” I said. “Have you read much of it?”

John shook his head. “No libraries around here,kid,” he answered. “Or newsagents either.”

“What would be your own assessment of your career then?” I asked undaunted. “Some people have pilloried you for your eccentric and narcissistic behaviour while others have lauded your creative talent. Do you have any regrets about anything?”

“Regrets?” laughed John. “Like Paul Anka didn’t quite say in that song he wrote for Old Blue Eyes, ‘regrets I have a barrel-load but then again too many to mention’. Regrets weigh you down too much, I find. They drain the gumption out of you. They cripple you! And given my childhood desertion issues, I was always crippled badly enough as it was without adding to the problem!”

“So Crippled Inside was an autobiographical song?” I said.

“In a way, kid. But really it was a celebration of the kingdom of crippledom to which most of us belong, aint I right?” he grinned. I couldn’t disagree. He was getting into his flow now. “But as for regret, notice it by all means,” he continued, “but then let it fly away into the dark dark night like Paul’s fucking granny music blackbird. Living is hard enough as it is and anyway, as some wise person once observed, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’.”

“I seem to recall that wise person was you,” I reminded him.

“Not me, kid,” he retorted. “I was quoting from someone else whose name currently escapes me. So what’s your assessment of my career anyway?”

“It went backwards and forwards from the sublime to the ridiculous,” I ventured boldly. “You were like a big brother to me. The one I never had. I tried to follow where you led. At the beginning anyway. Then it went sour.”

“Oh yeah?” replied John, shooting me a piercing glance. We fell into a few seconds of awkward silence. “I never had a big brother either,” he mused then. “Stewart was the nearest I had to that. He died from a brain hemorrhage. I laughed when I heard the news. Can you believe that? My best friend kaput and I bloody giggled! They say those chimps in the PG Tips commercial didn’t laugh because they found something funny but because they were terrified. That was me too. Fucking shit scared and devestated.”

“You compare yourself to a primate?” I asked.

“Certainly I do,” said John. “Or rather did. I took a long time to grow up.”

“I read about you laughing when Stew died,” I admitted.

“Where?” demanded John. “In Playboy or Rolling Stone magazine?”

“In some book or other,” I said. “Can’t remember which. There’s been dozens written about you. Memoirs and the like. Feature length obituaries.”

“The only book I remember is the Hunter Davies one,” he reflected. “Brian authorized that. It was mainly flannel and soft soap for the pop market.”

“There’s probably more books written about you in the last forty years than about Jesus,” I remarked provocatively.

John took it in his stride. “Oh, don’t remind me of that gaff,” he chuckled. “I got so much hate mail from the fucking God squad!”

“So where do you stand with God now?” I asked.

“In the dark like I always did,” he answered. “God is a concept by which you measure the rain.”

“Shouldn’t that be ‘measure your pain’?” I corrected him.

“You use the Godometer for what you need to measure and I’ll use it for what I need to measure, kid,” he snorted. “No offence intended.”

“None taken,” I snapped back before adding under my breath. “At least not any more.” But John was too sharp and he caught it and wanted to know what I meant. I told him how much I’d always envied his ability to make those instant off-the-cuff jokes, how I spent my teenage years trying to copy him and falling flat on my dismal face, how I’d shifted over time from loving his blasphemous talent to loathing it.

He just stared right at me for a while, a withering look of incomprehension on his face. I felt put on the spot, fascinated and intimidated simultaneously, scrutinised for impropriety and by who? An anarchic rock and roll legend of all people who had abandoned God in much the same reckless way he had abandoned his first wife! How crazy was that! “You have to admit that sometimes you could be gratuitously offensive,” I told him to break the silence.

“Huh! I had to spend ten years listening to the media and many of our band’s so-called fans being offensive to Yoko,” he objected.

“They had a point,” I said. “Wasn’t it her fault the band split up?”

“That’s bollocks,” sneered John. “She became a very convenient scapegoat for thickheads and racists.”

“That’s not a nice way to describe all those fans like me who bought your records,” I objected, “who turned you into the very rich privileged man you became?”

“If the cap fits, kid, you wear it,” said John. “I said many, not all.” This instantly triggered something in his brain because he picked up the guitar and began strumming again. “If the cap fits, you wear it,” he sang in a staccato rhythm, “When the guilt’s mutual, just share it. Your fucking war, I can’t bear it.”

“Which war are you referring to?” I asked when he paused to tighten the D string.

“Does it matter?” he asked back. “They come along so thick and fast, one begetting another. Or haven’t you noticed?” He didn’t wait for an answer but picked up again on the riff with, “Jaw jaw is better than war war, Hate ain’t what He created us for.”

“Which He is that?” I interjected. “The great patriarchal God you don’t believe in?”

“Okay, ‘Hate ain’t what she created us for’,” he sang. “Does that make it sound better?” I pulled a face which he proceeded to parody. “You look like you’ve just bit too deep into an onion, kid,” he said. “It’s not a glass one by any chance?” I decided not to take issue. “You read too much into the words, kid,” he remarked. “You see meanings where they’re least intended. Here’s another clue for you all. It’s not God that’s the problem. It’s religion.”

He went over to the pool and drank from it then splashed water all over his face and head. He looked strangely purified and vulnerable when he had finished his ablutions. “Do you have any more questions or are you going to leave me in peace?” he asked.

Of course I had more questions. Tons more. I wanted to know about his primal scream therapy and his subsequent transformation from candy floss entertainer to distraught philosopher and arrogant political activist. I wanted to know how those tunes arose from the ether of his mind and if he really imagined human nature could be saved from its innate destructive tendencies or if the whole spiel was just a pose. I wanted to know what it felt like to die and whether I had been justified to fire the gun. I wanted to know which of us was the most psychotic and sick. I wanted to ask all that and much much more but the only words that finally came out of my mouth were, “Have you ever read The Catcher In The Rye?”

I don’t know if it was by way of an answer but he picked up his guitar and launched into that song he had been singing when I first arrived. It began, “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup. They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe. Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind, possessing and caressing me.”

I felt strangely moved by the gentle lyrical beauty of his singing. When John reached the end he put the guitar down, stretched and yawned as if suddenly succumbing to fatigue. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend,” he said as he lay down on the floor, eyes closed. “I didn’t know you at first. What great things we might have achieved together! Let us sleep now.”

But I was too tired to sleep, tired of the blighted thing my life had become. So I sat on the ground and stared at the infinite expanse of sky and fertile land into which I had somehow wandered as it gradually receded, shrinking back down into the concrete cage they had locked me in to eke out my days. As the man once sang, “The dream is over.”