From The Beatles To Football, There Is Only One Obsession Worth The Name…

A column commissioned by Men’s Health magazine for their Jan/Feb issue of 1998.

We hear a great deal of Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, and Malibu’s “babe-tastic” golden beaches. But how many visitors to Los Angeles think of visiting its lesser-celebrated attraction, The Air-Conditioning & Refrigeration Industry Museum? The answer, I’d venture, is very few. But here is the point to grasp. Somebody visits it. Or else it wouldn’t exist. There are in this world some people so obsessed by air conditioning and refrigeration that they require a museum to satisfy their lust. Can this be healthy? There is a fine line between collecting teapots and believing you are, yourself, a teapot. Are some obsessions weirder than others, or are they all the symptoms of a sick mind?
To those of us who are not obsessed by anything much, there is nothing so tiresome as people who are. Rare is the golfer whose conversation could not be improved by a five-iron, or whatever it’s called, being shoved down his gullet. In Kansas you will find The International Brick Collectors Association, and we are fortunate it’s no nearer. Also, apparently, there is a growing obsession with collecting body parts of famous dead people: for example Napoleon’s penis or Hitler’s teeth. These macabre obsessives were thrown into confusion when the market threw up two skulls belonging to Oliver Cromwell. Then it was explained that the smaller skull was Cromwell’s when he was a child. Since obsessive people are fiery rather than bright, this explanation was accepted.
Nowhere is there more obsession per square foot than in the world of rock’n’roll. When I worked on a music paper the office reception was often clogged with foggy-witted characters believing they had arranged to meet David Bowie there. There was one poor man who claimed he was David Bowie, having acquired a new body, like Dr Who at the end of a series. A woman used to ring up every day asking for news of Kevin Rowland. To this day I cannot meet a Gary Numan fan without feeling a chill of anxiety. And there are people who get obsessed in reverse. I knew a man whose chief passion was hatred of the singer in Simple Minds. Everything came back to Jim Kerr. He would listen to Beethoven and sneer in triumph, “Ha! Just imagine Jim Kerr trying to write that!”
Because I write books about The Beatles, I meet Fab Four obsessives regularly. They assume I am one of them, but I am not. I just like the group. As a child I went to school in Liverpool, where my bus said “Penny Lane” on the front. But it never occurred to me to go the extra stops and see it. Not until last year did I visit the famous roundabout where a pretty nurse had sold poppies from a tray. Yet there are daily coach parties there, full of folk from Ohio and Osaka, gasping in awe like pilgrims reaching Mecca. The natives will smile and wave to them, all the time thinking: “There goes a coach load of complete knobheads!”
Creepiest of all was promoting my recent book about John Lennon, on US radio talk-shows. Late-night phone-ins were the worst. The airwaves were commandeered by raspy psychopaths: “Uhhh… I gotta question for the gennelman from England…” I think of Beatle music as fresh and fun and life-affirming, but not when it’s in the hands of lonely males in Cleveland with nobody to talk to at 3am. I kept picturing Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Then you go on-air in Boston – a town not short of pseudo-Irishmen with sentimental ideas about the IRA – and you encounter two types of obsessive rolled into one. Thus: “Hey! Ya talk about the pain in John Lennon’s songs. But ya don’t talk about the pain he felt bein’ Irish in Liverpool! Spat on! Treated like a dog!” One tries to reason: “Erm, It’s not like that. Nearly everyone in Liverpool is a bit Irish. It’s not a problem. And John was not very Irish anyway.” But it’s no good. In the full energy of his ignorance, he clung to his cherished vision of Johnny O’Lennon, shamrocked victim of British imperialism.
Rock obsessives are sad. Political obsessives are mad. And religious obsessives can be the most worrying of all. The only obsessives I feel some sympathy for are trainspotters, partly because they are harmless, but mostly because they are routinely derided by the smug, under the illusion that they themselves are hip and full of interest. A word, too, on behalf of genuine football fans, whose obsession is sincere but is now travestied by adverts for anything from Coca-Cola to Sky TV, poncing off the lifeblood of an authentic passion. Yet the monomaniac of any stripe is apt to be a bore, and normally an over-talkative one. Whether your foible is gas-lamps, computers, conveyancing or cormorants, please obsess quietly. Thank you.
There is to my own mind only one obsession worth the name. A man’s life is a more or less well-ordered thing, until… she arrives. The Inconvenient Girl. She is so inconveniently lovely, and so inconveniently fascinating, and so inconveniently prepared to give you the time of day, that you cannot concentrate on bricks, golf or Oliver Cromwell’s head any longer. Even the air conditioning and refrigeration industry loses some of its appeal. When The Inconvenient Girl has installed herself in your life, all other infatuations are sent scampering. Your obsession with her is the only obsession she will ever tolerate. Indeed she seems to expect it as her due.
Friends will abandon you, but you will not care. You are possessed by a nobler emotion now, and there is something of poetry in your soul. Why, you might even chance your arm at a sonnet, or something. You will spend whole hours trying to remember what you ever used to think about before you started thinking about this woman. Your new obsession is more than a pastime – it is destiny. It’s the one that’s worth going all the way to Penny Lane for. Or to Abbey Road. You’d go to the Octopus’s bleeding Garden if it seemed necessary. Love is the sudden, blinding flash of understanding – now you understand that obsession is madness. And that madness can be divine.