If there's one thing you learn at school, it's how to open and close your mouth in time to a hymn at assembly without ever having to use your voice to sing. Pupils at a school in Devon won't get the chance to do that to Imagine any more.
Pupils at St Leonards Primary School in Exeter, or rather some wet behind the ears hippy sodding drama teacher for all we know, thought that a school concert would be snazzed up a little by a rendition of Imagine by John Lennon. Well, we say 'snazzed up,' but it's more the case that it'd have been slowed to a dreary crawl by a bunch of kids singing a song they have no connection with that was written by a man 30 years before they were born. But we digress – the school has banned the kids from singing Imagine as one of the teachers says it's anti-religious.
If John Lennon were alive now… well, firstly if John Lennon were alive now he'd probably be pretty annoyed that all his clothes had been auctioned off and that people were queuing up to look at replicas of his teeth, but after that he might be a bit confused that so many people were still making such a fuss about his song Imagine.
According to reports today, a school concert will have to go without a loving rendition of Imagine by John Lennon because of how anti-religious it is. According to The Telegraph:
Geoffrey Williams, the head of St Leonard's Primary School in Exeter, Devon, omitted the song, which contains the words "and no religion too", after a teacher expressed concern.
Apparently the song's sentiment – something along the lines of how much better the world would be if we all replaced God with The Brotherhood Of Man, the band who won the 1976 Eurovision song contest with the cheeky ode to falling in love with a toddler Save Your Kisses For Me – clashed with the Church of England nature of the school. Geoffrey Williams defended the move to ban Imagine by saying:
"We have not banned the song. We chose not to perform it at our public concert but to perform another song we had practiced which better reflected the theme of Songs For A Green Earth. We are a Church school and we believe God is the foundation of all we do. As such we did not feel that Imagine was an appropriate song to perform publicly."
Imagine has always been a contentious enough song – not least because the man who sang "imagine no possessions" drove around in a fuck-off big Rolls Royce and bought an entire apartment just to keep his fur coats nice and refrigerated in – but it's hoped that the replacement song will be less controversial. It's a rendition of I Raped The Virgin Mary And Hung The Bastard Christ by Cradle Of Filth.
Read more:
C Of E School Slaps A Ban On Imagine – Telegraph
[story by Stuart Heritage]
