John Lennon would have had his 80th birthday in 2020 and his album Imagine is soon to be 50. This protest song still stands up half a century later.

Here’s a track from one of the biggest albums of 1971. It seemed as if every single person I went to school with had John Lennon’s solo album Imagine. It was played constantly.

Written more than 50 years ago, this fury-filled protest song is as appropriate now as it was when John Lennon wrote it. In fact it has never seemed more relevant than today.

You hear a lot these days about how Lennon “wasn’t a very nice person” but nobody bought his records to hear him being nice – they had Paul McCartney for that – and I’m not interested in a feud with his former Beatle pal.

This, though, is like a prototype punk protest song. An angry tirade against hypocritical politicians, I remember enjoying Generation X covering it during the punk era. The song’s lyrical rage was harder to take from a multi-millionaire like John Lennon, but there’s no doubt from his vitriolic delivery that he meant every word.

Skipping back through the album today, I find it’s this song – produced by Phil Spector and with a lovely little slide guitar solo by George Harrison – that sounds most musically contemporary.

The descending chords lure you in for the spiteful lyric that picks its targets with precision. Just take out the reference to “Tricky Dicky” President Nixon and change “short-haired, yellow-bellied” to “yellow-haired, pot-bellied” and you’ve got two more targets to aim at.

The message doesn’t need changing at all.