NOSTALGIA:THE ABBEY ROAD recording studio is like the Tardis. From the outside, it looks like a spacious house but inside it expands via a number of tight corridors into a giant recording complex. If you go walkabout and follow a trail of evocative black and white photographs from the 1960s (Cilla Black sitting on Paul McCartney's knee having a smoke – how cool!), you'll eventually come to the sacred place that is Studio Two – the surprisingly small studio space that The Beatles used to record almost all of their records.
Yoko Ono was an Abbey Road ever-present during the final Beatles albums. After a 40-year gap, she’s back there today, for the remastering of all the solo John Lennon albums, which will be released in October to mark what would have been his 70th birthday.
“It’s working out very well musically but it hasn’t been easy on me,” she says. “I’ve so many memories of each song. I’m just trying to be really professional about it and not feel perturbed by the experience but so many years have passed now and if anything I feel more emotional. Just being there so close to his music, I am discovering so many new things about John.”
Stylishly dressed in black and sporting a stove pipe, she looks more like 47 than her actual 77. So small and thin you could probably pick her up in one hand, she gets all embarrassed when you mention what such good nick she’s in. “I just try to be careful with what I eat but I cheat all the time. The only big thing I do is drink ginger tea – it’s so good for you. You just grate some ginger and put it into hot water a few times a day.”
She wells up again when she notices my copy of the complete Playboy interviews they did in 1980 – a series of in-depth interviews they gave days before Lennon was shot. “Oh I remember doing those so well. It’s so nice to see that again,” she says, staring at the book’s cover. “I like the fact you’re Irish because John regarded himself as Irish. He wrote some great songs about Ireland.”
In 1967, after a newspaper advertisement for “an island off Ireland” that was up for sale caught Lennon’s eye, the couple bought Dorinish Island in Clew Bay off Co Mayo. The island cost them £1,700 and they visited it once with plans to make it their retirement home. “It was a place where we thought we could escape the pressures and spend some undisturbed time together,” she says. “But because of what happened, our hopes never came to be. We often discussed the idea of building a cottage there. It was so beautiful, so tranquil, yet so isolated; it seemed a perfect place to get away from it all.” After Lennon’s murder, Ono sold the island and donated the money to an Irish orphanage.
Given that the man who shot Lennon, Mark Chapman, is up for parole a few weeks after this interview took place (Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life in 1981), talk turns to the night of Lennon’s murder. Ono’s appeal earlier this month to the New York State Parole Board was successful and Chapman remains in prison.
When I ask if she thinks others were involved in the murder, she says: “I still don’t know. We were working for world peace and there were many oppositions to us.”
Little is known of Ono’s life before she became “the woman who broke up The Beatles”. She had a thriving career as an avant-garde artist before finding herself a media hate figure. “In the very early days I studied Italian opera, German lieder and French chanson, but that was way back when I was just 13,” she says. “When I met John we tried to create something with our bed-ins for peace – you could say we made our bed and had to sleep in it from then on. I think to John, I was this very alien power. Maybe he learned something from the way I was but it was a real partnership between us. I had no influence over him musically – I knew better than to tell him to do this or that. Artists have their own pride and you can’t tell them what to do. Maybe we were a bit naive with our bed-ins for peace – people look at the world now and can say we didn’t have that much effect but at the time [late 1960s] we were on the threshold of a beautiful, powerful world.”
To mark the release of the remastered albums, the Gimme Some Truth campaign will involve a series of charity concerts around the world featuring artists who were inspired/influenced by Lennon’s music.
“It’s important to me for John’s music to be heard as it would sound today,” she says. “The big changes people will notice first is how much to the front his voice his – I remember always trying to push John’s vocals up at the time they were originally recorded in the 1970s but you can’t fight the whole musical world.
“The really new thing here is a stripped down mix of the Double Fantasy album. I took a lot of the instrumentation off and you can now hear all the incredible things he’s doing with his voice – the diction is just fantastic. There’s time he uses that classic English diction – almost like a Shakespearean actor – and then you hear him changing back into his Liverpool accent.”
She thinks that if Lennon were still alive he would be into new music and the possibilities afforded by digital distribution. “John was always talking about creating a global village so he’d probably have an ‘I told you so’ attitude to the internet age. Right now he’d be making art work with computer programmes and communicating with the world in a much quicker way.
“The thing that is really hitting me is how many sad songs he had and I feel guilty about that because I was the cause of that. But then if he wasn’t in that position, he wouldn’t have written those songs – John always turned around a difficult situation by writing a song about it.”
The entire John Lennon back catalogue will be available from October 1st. johnlennon.com
