Why not Mount Rushmore for the Ramones?

FORGET that South Bank Show special, forget the breathless acclaim of the bestselling biography and certainly forget anything as intangible as a ‘reputation’ - for some artists, the ultimate accolade is having a memorial created in your honour.

In simpler times, there was a stock answer to the query "What will my monument look like?" Memorials were either Classical (pensive men on pedestals, as found in most Scottish town squares), Gothic (Edinburgh’s Scott Monument) or Equestrian (self- explanatory).

Any of these options are still exercised to commemorate literary lions and war heroes, but more plebeian heroes such as rock stars and entertainers have had to make do with more dishevelled arrangements, such as the fag-littered grave of Jim Morrison at Pere Lachaise, or the improvised shrine to the Beatles at Abbey Road studios where fans make pilgrimages to top up tributes of flowers and apples.

So if a pop hero is secretly hoping for something more upmarket than a crumpled packet of Lambert and Butler and an alcopop bottle strewn beside a picture frame after their demise, they should follow the egotistical example of Johnny Ramone who spent the last months of his life arranging his legacy insurance in the form of a 70,000 bronze statue, unveiled on a prime spot at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery recently.

Maybe it is fitting that a musician who seemed to go at life and art with a chisel has carved his own tribute, and arguably the Ramones were a phenomenon worth marking - a ragtag foursome who made a refreshingly proletarian impact on the music scene at a time when many of the acts appeared to have been designed by Habitat. Over the years their noisy, brutish work gave the dormant, menopausal American rock scene a welcome goosing and - god love them - they never sold out, possibly because they never sold enough.

By choosing to go solo with his sculpture, Ramone fails to come to grips with his true legacy, which was to marshal four wildly contrasting personalities and unite them under one name and practically one hairstyle.

His decision to reject a group sculpture in favour of a Taj Mahal all to himself might have been borne out of something more than rock-star hubris, since music’s most homogeneous-looking band were anything but a happy family. Joey never forgave Johnny for stealing his girlfriend Linda in 1981, while Johnny, a fervent Republican, was the only member of the band who exited stage right and refused to play the Ramones’ song ‘Bonzo Goes to Bitburg’ on tour because it lampooned his personal hero Ronald Reagan.

Long before they split in 1996, everyone sat as far apart as possible on the tour bus. Yet musically they had a musketeer spirit that Johnny’s self-homage fails to encapsulate. Admittedly a sculpture of all four Ramones may have been a dauntingly complicated piece of work: Deedee Ramone for instance was as active in the pharmaceutical trade as Hoffman La Roche, so a realistic likeness of the band’s chief songsmith would perhaps have been a statue that fell over a lot.

Yet Ramone’s memorial recommends an intriguing new line in public monuments. When well-loved artists and entertainers die there are formal tributes, interviews with friends, a gush of doting anecdotage, but that’s as far as it goes. Kenneth Tynan wrote of Eric Morecambe: "It is doubtful whether much that is memorable will be left in print about him."

Often that’s the fate of popular figures. For some reason, Morecambe and Wise as a double act, who at their peak made the Guinness Book Of Records for viewing figures, were not considered plinth material. But when Eric Morecambe’s home town put up a humorous statue to its most famous son, it became a tourist attraction in its own right. Southampton is contemplating a statue to Benny Hill, and let’s hope they’ve put in a planning application that includes space for a line of mini-skirted nurses in pursuit.

Public statues paying tribute to our most entertaining stars should be representative of the vibrant life they led as much as adhering to details of their physical attributes. I’m sure they would appreciate the gesture, and it would make sitting on the park bench opposite far more enjoyable.