Yoko Ono...

A lot of people who like the Beatles have a problem with Yoko Ono. A lot of people like the Beatles, so that's a big constituency of people to be having a problem with you. But at least these days, they're not quite so vociferously racist and misogynistic about it as they once were. So I'm sure Yoko will be taking whatever problems people have with her in her stride as she always has. She's 'a cool chick, baby'. And a brave one.

Perhaps her early work was preparing her for her forthcoming role as a Beatle wife. 'Cut piece' (1965) seems now to be little more than an abstraction of the kind of thing she was soon to be subjected to by the British press and public for real.



She's 'a cool chick, baby'. And a brave one.

I started taking a closer interest in Yoko when I kept seeing her 'Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band' LP nuzzling up next to her husband's similarly eponymous counterpart in a lot of these '4 zillion LPs you have to hear before you snuff it...'-type books. So I gave YO/POB  a listen. It is, to say the very least, erm....challenging. The first track, which goes on for a fair bit, is a cacophony of banshee wailing, discordant overdriven guitar (Lennon) and a rhythm section that doesn't seem to be able to keep up with either husband or wife in the avant garde stakes (Ringo Starr and Klaus Voorman). But by track two, it's clear that Ono is streets ahead of all three of them. 'Greenfield morning' is like nothing you've ever heard - or would have been back then in 1970.



Lennon said in the 1970s that Yoko was making 1980s music and it was only in that decade that people began to recognise it in larger numbers. Indeed, contemporary reviews of the couple's 'Double Fantasy' LP I recall were grudgingly accepting of the now evident fact that, in terms of cutting edge and relevance, Yoko was leaving her bread-baking hubby quite some distance behind. A few cool ones like Viv Albertine and John Lydon were in on Yoko from the start, but it was only when that generation started to make its own music that her own influence and importance began to emerge from the shadow of 'him indoors'.

They were, their very publicly aired fallings out and difficulties notwithsatanding, a pretty solid and admirable couple I think. Testament to John's self-proclaimed A&R abilities is his decision to stand aside and allow Ono to carry on her career - helped, no doubt, by her uncanny abilities with the investment portfolio. Not many artists would make that sacrifice for their partners - even fewer great ones. But it was (and probably still is) so easy to laugh at them. Lennon's notorious biographer, Albert Goldman who, incidentally, should really have callled that book 'The Lives of Yoko Ono', such a hurry is he in to get his claws into her much easier to pillory contribution to the sixties counter-culture that he's so determined to piss all over - notes with glee how she was working on 'Walking on Thin Ice' with unseemly haste in the wake of her husband's assasination. Her steely-eyed resolve to be a pop star (how dare she!) over-riding any sense of decency. No mention of the fact that, back in Sussex, Paul McCartney was doing precisely the same thing. Lennon would have expected nothing less of either of them. Anyway, have a listen:




And take note Mr. Goldman's ghost: the woman watched the man she loved being gunned down in the street.

I'm thinking of ways to write a song about her - maybe John singing to her from beyond the grave? Vague idea for the title: 'Woman is the nijab of the world'. Playing on the ironies of the veil - the elimination of the superficial as a path to inner freedom. She and Lennon explored similar ideas when they (yes, it is as hard to type it without laughing as it probably is to read it) conducted interviews whilst sitting inside a bag. We'll see - there's enough there for several songs.

So yes, she deserves a song, I think. She's a cool chick, baby. And a brave one.

L.U.V. on y'all

xx