Grant Morrison's The Invisibles is one of my absolute favorite comic book series of all time. I fell in love by the middle of the very first issue, when King Mob, Morrison's pseudo-self-insert in the story, performs some ritualistic chaos magick to summon the spirit of John Lennon. My young mind was blown by this wild mashup of psychedelia, rock n' roll, super spies, and dark fantasy; that's just one of the ways that I would say this book literally changed my life.
In a recent edition of their Xanaduum newsletter, Morrison shared an unreleased song from one of their old psychedelic post-punk bands, a tune called "John Lennon Like You." They go on to explain that the recording was made during an actual magical ritual, which served as the inspiration for that page in the first issue of The Invisibles.
On October 9 1993, which would have been John Lennon's 53rd birthday had the Arch-Beatle not been shot dead by Mark Chapman in 1980, I performed a ritual intended to incarnate Lennon as a god.
I wanted to make a dedication at the beginning of what was a whole new life for me in many ways. I wanted to summon a spirit of pure psychedelic inspiration into a Lennon-shaped environment. I sought not to manifest the real man; the troubled, cruel and violent Lennon with his flaws and contradictions but instead evoke Lennon the twisted mystic, the pop star intellectual, the elemental Air of the four Beatles as stripped back to their cartoon archetypes.
The recording (as well as more scintillating details about the ritual) are all locked behind the paywall (which I think is more than worth the cost, but that's just me). However, Morrison also performed an acoustic (and thus slightly-less psychedelic) version of "John Lennon Like You" at a Hollywood comic book store during a promotional event for their 2011 non-fiction-book-slash-memoir, Supergods — using a guitar given to him by moderator/My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way.
It may not have all of the magical elements of the fateful night in 1993, but the video (above) is still pretty close.
14/6 John Lennon Like You [Grant Morrison / Xanaduum]
