How a seance that summoned John Lennon led to a one-hit wonder
Poor John Lennon could never quite catch a break, could he? In life, and even in death, he was always being summoned for one spiritual conspiracy or another.
In fairness, much of this reputation came from his own making, whether it was in his creepily accurate obsession with the number nine or any number of the theories that swirled around The Beatles that they were government plants, time travellers, or simply dead all along.
You would think that after Lennon’s tragic murder in 1980, the rumours might have stopped out of a modicum of respect for the man and his family. But instead, this seemingly only acted to serve fuel to the fire – and it’s something which, even as long as 45 years later, still permeates his legacy just as much as his music.
Of course, in the far more immediate aftermath of the musician’s demise, those conspiracies and theories were far more rampant than they ever were, and not least when it came to the fated tale of the one-hit wonder ‘The Story of the Blues’ by Wah!. Back in 1983, the spirit of Lennon was still as prescient in society as it ever was when he was alive, so the band felt it was their duty to channel this for their one shot at musical majesty.
‘The Story of the Blues’ was a song which its singer and songwriter, Pete Wylie, was keen to embody the old-school idea of a “drinking song”, and as such, he quickly landed on a mantra similar to ‘One For My Baby (And One For the Road)’ but Frank Sinatra, in all his classic, crooning groove.
The only trouble was, however, that Wylie’s surroundings were far less glamorous than Sinatra’s were. In his own words, his environment at that time was made up of “unemployment, Liverpool, the fact that I’d just had a break-up/breakdown,” but this was ultimately the catalyst through which the song “changed into this big, anthemic thing about what was going on.”
As such, with the grip of Liverpool set firmly in his sights, there was only one legend Wylie could turn to in order to capture the true essence of the place. From there, he enlisted the help of producer Mike Hedges, with whom he “got on instantly”, and they headed to the studio, where “we got violins, backing singers – and even had the mad idea of performing a seance in there, to get the spirit of John Lennon on the track.”
Whatever floats your boat. It might seem an utterly bizarre notion to some, but whether it was the spirit of Lennon from the dead or just a sheer stroke of luck, it did serve Wah! well in catapulting ‘The Story of the Blues’ to the top of the zeitgeist.
In the end, the rush of exhilaration didn’t ultimately last long, and the band became another classic case in the overflowing 1980s graveyard of one-hit wonders. You could imagine that Lennon might have been keen to help out if he were still alive, with a shared Liverpudlian bond intrinsically connecting him to Wah! – but asking for his services from beyond the grave was certainly a hefty request.
