Completely forgot to do this yesterday, I don’t know what happened. Lapse in concentration I’ll put it down to. Hopefully what I go on to say was worth the grueling wait.

My passion for the Beatles truly came into fruition at the beginning of this decade. Come to think of it, I’ve been a Beatles fan for ten years almost exactly to the day. Though it was 2010 when I began venturing into the members’ solo ventures. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was the most shocking out of them to me. Not ‘shocking’ in that it scared me, though those screams at the end of ‘Mother’ made 15-year-old me quite uneasy, but here was John Lennon – the funny guy from the group with the sharpest wit and cheek – full of rage and singing about how much pain he was in….. It’s a great listen though. One of the best albums ever, in my opinion.

I remember ‘Isolation’ being one of the songs that I warmed to straight away. It’s a slow blues-type number with a swing-feel to it. Like the other tracks on the album, the production is very sparse and dry but the instrumentation fills up the soundscape, particularly those climbing notes from the piano. Lennon, who plays the keys, is accompanied only by Klaus Voorman on bass and Ringo Starr on drums.

Just my own thoughts here but I think the song’s greatest strength is its tempo. The rhythm is just so perfectly timed that when the bridge comes in via Lennon’s elongated note, it makes every pound on the piano and cymbal crash hit so much harder. I feel like punching a hole into a desk when the very final chord of the track suddenly brings things to a halt, it’s all very cathartic.