YOKO ONO'S AUSTRALIAN
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When John Lennon married Yoko Ono in 1969, they famously turned their seven day honeymoon at the Amsterdam Hilton into a "bed-in". Press conferences were held with the couple, who pontificated on peace from their pillows. From now on, they declared, they would use their global celebrity as a medium for making protest art. "We weren't very popular, let's put it that way," says Yoko today, sitting in the corner of a sofa in a suite at London's Claridges Hotel. "But we weren't thinking of whether we were going to be popular or not. We just felt that it was important for us to stand up for some issues, because maybe we could make a difference." In October 1971, not long after that first post-nuptial declaration, Lennon's most enduring recording, Imagine, was released. "For us," Yoko says, "it was like a summation of what we believed." Almost three decades later Imagine - re-released at the end of last year for the third millennium - seems to have become a sort of secular hymn. In the early days, the World Church asked Lennon if they could use the song and change the lyrics from "Imagine no religion" to "Imagine one religion". Lennon told them they didn't understand it at all. Now the lyrics have been voted most popular in a BBC survey and in the recent HMV Music of the Millennium poll - the largest of its kind to ever be conducted - Lennon himself, was voted "best songwriter" and "most influential artist". The latest release of Imagine reached No. 3 on the UK charts just before Christmas and is considered by many as a non-denominational anthem for world humanism. Yoko thinks it is perfectly understandable that the song should gain this status. "I think Imagine is not just a statement to encourage social change. I think it was almost prophetic. When you take a line from the song, "Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do", for instance - well, we're getting there. When the Berlin Wall came down, I remember thinking, "OK, it's happening, John". That's just how I felt about it. And so I like to think that the song was a very positive vision of the future."
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Dressed
in black jeans and Chanel runners, with a grey jacket, Lennon's widow looks far younger
than her 66 years. She was born into a wealthy and socially prominent Japanese family, to
a Buddhist mother and Christian father. The family spent much time before World War II
travelling between Japan and the United States. Deeply traumatised by her experience of
the war in Japan, Yoko spent the '50s developing her artistic talents before moving to New
York in the early '60s. There she became an early member of the avant-garde art scene and
among the first to stage concerts in a loft. It was at her 1966 one-woman show in London
that she met Lennon. Today she has an air of anonymous affluence (she is rumoured to be worth about $700 million). But behind the pale blue lenses of her silver-framed glasses, her eyes retain the intensity which you can see in photographs of her as a performance artist back in the early '60s, and never more so than when discussing the significance of her husband's most popular song. Politically, Imagine was an act of liberation for Lennon. Its utopian theme and lyrical simplicity expressed his growing disillusionment with the New Left at the end of the '60s, many of whose causes he and Yoko had supported. As the radical intellectuals of the New Left had been eager to court John and Yoko as the perfect propagandists (a role which the couple had seemed to enjoy, albeit temporarily), so Imagine could be seen to challenge that faction's hard-line political notion of social revolution. "Imagine was something which most definitely did not satisfy the New Left. Or the New Right come to that," Yoko remembers. "It was a genuine wish, a dream for the future. It had a naivety about it, even on the level of the very simple chords, and the lyrics which anyone can understand. Actually, other songwriters have said that it's 'so simplistic', or things like that and, of course, we can all be artistic snob. But this was the song which John really wanted to communicate to the world. So he dispensed with his artistic snobbery and really made it very sweet and simple - to get the message across." Artistically, the simple list of instructions within the song's lyrics share the technique of Yoko's "instruction paintings", where the viewer is requested to "imagine" a conceptual function of each piece. Throughout the '60s these instruction pieces had played a central part in Yoko's own artistic practice.
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