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Posts tagged ‘Yoko Ono’

Feb 20

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Oh, Yoko

The first time I met Yoko Ono, at the Apple HQ in Savile Row in September 1969, I was impressed by her obvious engagement. She and John Lennon were doing a day of interviews, and I got my couple of hours on behalf of the Melody Maker. At that stage she was being treated by the media as a bit of a sour joke. The film she’d made of people’s bottoms got her in the papers, and her relationship with Lennon rendered her, in the eyes of many, what we would nowadays call toxic. Not only did she look weird, she thought weird. But at that first meeting, it was impossible to ignore the way the two of them shared the burden of the interview as equal voices.

The second time, two years later, was just after they’d moved to New York and temporarily sequestered themselves in a suite in the St Regis Hotel on East 55th Street. I spent a few days with them in the hotel, at the Record Plant studio a dozen blocks south, and on a trip to the West Village during their hunt for a permanent address. And that time I could see, much closer up, what it was that he liked so much about her: she was funny, and physical, and assertive, and full of life and ideas — all the characteristics that are currently on very clear display at Tate Modern in Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, an exhibition of her life’s work.

The wittiest T-shirt around just now carries the message JOHN LENNON BROKE UP FLUXUS — a play on the belief that Yoko destroyed the Beatles. Her work while a member of Fluxus, the informal avant-garde art movement founded in New York by her friend George Maciunas in 1961, also involving La Monte Young, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Jonas Mekas and many others in events often held in her downtown loft, is to me the most interesting part of the show, occupying several rooms.

It features documentation of the notorious Cut Piece of 1964, in which she sat on a chair in the Carnegie Recital Hall while members of the audience cut off her clothes, and Bag Piece of the same year, which I saw her re-enact with Lennon at the ICA in London in 1969, and Ono’s Sales List of 1965, in which she offered such items as a blank tape labelled “Sound tape of snow falling at dawn”, a Light House constructed from light, and custom-made underwear, including “special defects underwear for men — designed to accentuate your special defects: in cotton $10, in vicuna $175.”

Like a lot of people wandering through the rooms, I found myself smiling a lot, and occasionally laughing out loud at something like a 1962 work called Audience Piece to La Monte Young, in which the 20 performers simply lined up across the stage and stared at the audience until the audience left, and Smoke Piece of 1964: “Smoke everything you can / Including your pubic hair.”

The exhibition shows off her imagination and her indefatigability, as well as the way she was influenced by pre-existing Japanese culture (Zen koans, haiku, kabuki theatre) and the experience of living, as a child evacuated from her family home in Tokyo, through the final stages of World War Two.

On the morning I spent there, the show was full of women and small children who were having a good time with the all-white chess set, the wall-hung board into which visitors are invited to hammer a nail, and the room called Add Colour (Refugee Boat), whose walls, floor and eponymous centrepiece are covered in blue graffiti. In the final room, many people had accepted another of her invitations: to write something about their mothers on a small piece of paper and tape it to the wall.

I thought of Yoko’s own mother, a descendant of an aristocratic family forced — in the absence of her captured husband — to scuffle for her family’s existence amid the postwar ruins before, reunited, they left to resume a comfortable existence in the US. And, too, of the scar tissue of Lennon’s “Mother” (“You left me, but I never left you…”), written after he and Yoko had undergone a course of Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy. That’s something else they were mocked for, along with the bottoms movie and the riddles and the naked cover of Two Virgins and the Bed Peace event in Amsterdam.

Ah, peace. Remember that? WAR IS OVER!, they announced in 1969 via the medium of billboards plus a concert at at the Lyceum. All we are saying is GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. Send a bag of ACORNS FOR PEACE to world leaders. You can mock all that, too, if you want, but it wouldn’t really seem right in 2024.

I don’t mean to sound patronising when I say that I was surprised by how much the exhibition made me think, even when those thoughts were not necessarily the sort that can be followed to a conclusion. The first thing to do with a mind is open it.

* Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, curated by Julia Bingham and Patrizia Dander, is at Tate Modern until 1 September. There’s an illustrated book of the same name to accompany the exhibition, its selection of short essays including a good one on Yoko’s relationship to sound and silence by David Toop (Tate, £32).

Sep 19

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Mark Lewisohn’s ‘Hornsey Road’

Abbey Road

When the Guardian ran my interview with Mark Lewisohn about his Abbey Road stage show last week, the piece got 800,000 page views in 24 hours: more than that day’s Brexit coverage, they said. I don’t know what this means, except that the Beatles are still pretty popular. More popular than Brexit, anyway.

Mark had a lot of interesting things to say. What I didn’t have room to discuss in the piece was the use made in the show — which is actually titled Hornsey Road — of the original multitrack tapes, downloadable (astonishing as it may seem) from the video game called Beatles Rock Band, released in 2009. This allows anyone with the necessary equipment to make their own remixes: a dangerous opportunity, but one that Mark has used with care and sensitivity to form part of his two-hour show, which had its first night in Northampton this week and is touring around the country until early December.

I went to a run-through last week, and learnt a lot from his remixes of the original eight-tracks from Olympic, Trident and EMI’s Abbey Road studios between February and August 1969. He brought out a single bar of absolutely sublime McCartney bass-playing on “Because” that I’d never noticed before, ditto the cowbell on “Polythene Pam”. Thanks to him, I was paying closer attention and therefore better able to enjoy the sequence of guitar solos from McCartney, Harrison and Lennon on “The End”: two bars each, then repeat twice. Eighteen quite revealing bars — particularly Lennon’s — in a track that was the last thing they recorded together.

Revisiting Abbey Road was funny for me because it was 50 years ago to the week — on September 10, 1969, in fact — that I’d tipped up at the ICA in the Mall for a screening of several films by John & Yoko, including Two Virgins and Rape. It was a long and gruelling evening, during which an unidentified male and female in a white canvas bag led us all in a chant of “Hare Krishna” that lasted the entire 52 minutes of Yoko’s Film No 5. Was it the Lennons inside the bag? At first we assumed it was. Then we thought, almost certainly not. But it was Bag-ism in action, for sure.

The unexpected treat was a preview of Abbey Road, a couple of weeks ahead of its release. Side one was played in the interval, followed by side two as an accompaniment to John’s film Self Portrait, a 20-minute study of his penis rising and falling. By the time the evening ended, only a handful of the invited audience remained in the theatre.

It was a time when the Beatles — and the Lennons in particular — were in the headlines almost every day. Fleet Street was obsessed with their relationships, their business affairs, their eccentricities. It was also a time when Lennon was happy to sit and talk in the Beatles’ room at Apple HQ at 3 Savile Row, as he did a couple of days later. The following day he was in Toronto for the Live Peace Festival, with Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann and Alan White. On the Monday morning he called me up at the Melody Maker offices to give me the story, and specifically to deny the reports that he and Yoko had been booed off.

“That’s a load of rubbish,” he said. “It was a fantastic show — really unbelievable. It was magical. The band was so funky and we really blew some minds. We only had time to rehearse on the plane going over, and we did things like ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Money’, ‘Dizzy [Miss Lizzy]’, and a new song I’d never played before.” That would have been “Cold Turkey”, which the Beatles were about to turn down as their next single. “Then Yoko joined us,” he continued, “and sang one number [“Don’t Worry Kyoko”] before doing things like our Life with the Lions album. It was incredible because the crowd was howling along with us and they all joined in for ‘Give Peace a Chance’. Everyone was singing — it was like a great big mantra.”

My impression of Lewisohn’s show was that Hornsey Road tells the story in rewarding detail and with a nicely judged sense of how wonderfully absurd the events surrounding the Beatles sometimes were, half a century ago.

* The photograph of the Beatles was taken on the Thames at Twickenham on April 9, 1969 and is from the booklet accompanying the 2009 remastered version of Abbey Road. It is © Apple Corps Ltd.