Lennon's on sale again...

in the department stores, the tinsel is already on the shelves. In the music business, they are already talking about who will have the Christmas No 1 single. Early reports point to two likely front-runners: "Free as a Bird", sung by John Lennon, and "Heaven for Everyone", sung by Freddie Mercury. In pop, it seems, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong - neither stands a chance against the deceased.

Death, they say, is a great career move. And there's plenty of evidence for the cliche. When Mark Chapman set off for the Dakota Building with an autograph book in one pocket and a gun in the other, he sent Lennon straight to the top of the charts. Lennon has had only three No 1 hits as a solo artist, all in the two months after his death. (They would have been consecutive, but for one week when he had to make way for an act of even greater stature: the St Winifred's School Choir, with "There's No One Quite Like Grandma".)

The same sort of thing happened when Freddie Mercury died of Aids. His best-known song, "Bohemian Rhapsody", returned to No 1, raised pounds 1m for the Terrence Higgins Trust, and was voted Best British Single at the Brit Awards. Lennon died on 8 December 1980; Mercury on 24 November 1991. You don't have to go before Christmas - but it helps.

Elvis Presley died in mid-August 1977. Ever since, when not to be found stepping from a spacecraft, he's been busy releasing records. Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without another Elvis collection.

At EMI Records, they play down talk of a Christmas No 1. They can afford to: the Beatles' label, Apple, is distributed by EMI's subsidiary, Parlophone - also Queen's label. The Beatles have not even decided whether ''Free as a Bird'' will be a single. And Parlophone's marketing director, Mark Collen, has not even heard the album on which it appears - a collection of out-takes, live recordings and cover versions entitled The Beatles Anthology. But he knows he has two bestsellers on his hands.

The Queen album, Made in Heaven, is expected to sell between one and two million in Britain. Collen calls The Beatles' album a ''potential million-seller". Guarded about the record, he is expansive about the group. "They're in a category of their own. There's huge ongoing interest in The Beatles, which just seems to grow with the younger groups that come along - Oasis and the Britpop bands. Each generation discovers them for itself."

Both projects have already been accused of ghoulishness, as if the record companies were digging up bodies, not songs. "Good taste is a matter of opinion," Collen concedes. "But we're not in the business of callously exploiting people."

The accusation is peculiar to pop. Where would classical music be without the departed? When the Penguin Sixties were published, nobody muttered about exploitation. After all, half the point of being an artist is that your work outlives you.

We need have no qualms about the eight songs by Mercury on next month's new Queen album. For one thing, the group hadn't broken up. For another, Mercury knew he was dying, and showed it in his work. To this listener, most of Mercury's music, for all its verve and drama, was devoid of emotion. The one exception was "These Are the Days of Our Lives", released posthumously as a double A-side with "Bohemian Rhapsody". The word from EMI is that he remained on this new path.

It's been a bit different with Lennon. "Free as a Bird" has been worked up by the other three ex-Beatles from a demo made by Lennon in 1974. At the time, he probably wouldn't have dreamed of reuniting with Paul McCartney. Legally, of course, Yoko Ono has every right to hand over the demo tape, but some fans will feel that John would not have approved.

Any unease, however, is going to be nothing to our curiosity. It will take a strong- minded Lennon fan to boycott the record on principle. The Sun is already excited enough to have cleared last Tuesday's front page just for a photograph of the fab three. (Paul, as usual, was pop- eyed and boyish; Ringo stolid behind his shades; George, with a grey beard and no fringe, looked suddenly older.)

The main event of the reunion is a six-part television series, also called The Beatles Anthology, made by the ex-Beatles. It will be shown on ITV on Sunday nights from late November. The album, a double, is the first of three in the pipeline. Only a year has passed since the last Beatles anthology, Live at the BBC. If there is background noise on any of these records, it could be the sound of a barrel being scraped. If so, we have only ourselves to blame; Live at the BBC sold nearly a million in Britain, and spawned a hit single, "Baby It's You".

But death does not guarantee success. Janis Joplin, who died 25 years ago last Wednesday, hasn't troubled compilers of the British album chart since 1972. If The Beatles still sell, it's probably because they're still the best.