In 1970 DiLello also photographed the couple alongside activist Michael X at a fundraising event in London at which they auctioned off their newly shorn hair and “a pair of Muhammad Ali’s boxing shorts, covered in blood. It might be your last day – you might get run over by a car,” he added, a pointed reference to the manner of his mother’s death.Įqually, this new freedom found form in the couple’s political activities, from the bed-ins to their support for the Black Power movement. That’s how we’re living – cherishing each day and dreading it, too. So that’s what it’s all about, just moment by moment. We might have a cup of tea or we might get a moment’s happiness any minute now. That’s all right, this moment, and hold on, now. Or, as Lennon put it, describing the song’s message: “It’s now, this moment. When I suggested to her that, after The Beatles broke up, she might have thought, “Great, a whole new adventure for John and me as artists,” she shook her head and said firmly: “No, I didn’t. Only because they were doing it for how many years together.”

“No! What is he thinking? But he was kind of like threatening me: ‘Now it’s you and me, OK?’ I think he sussed that maybe I might leave or something… But I think he felt that what I was doing was more exciting. So she didn’t want him to end The Beatles? “I said, ‘Oh Jesus.’ Because I wanted some space for my own work.” I asked how she responded to Lennon’s announcement to Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr on 20 September 1969, one week after the Plastic Ono Band Toronto show, that he was leaving The Beatles. “It’s just that he needed somebody to lean on.” It just felt that he was… Well, you can say that I thought that he was curious about me.” Lennon didn’t need her to “liberate” himself, Ono insists he was capable of that on his own. “But I didn’t know anything about that really. Two months after meeting in Iceland, we were in Tokyo for the annual Dream Power charity concert she hosted at the 12,000-capacity Budokan arena, location of The Beatles’ summer 1966 shows in the Japanese capital. “Something was kicking in,” Ono told me in December 2009. He had a lot to deal with in a very short period of time.” Then he went from being a kid to being the most famous guy in the world. He had a lot of demons that he had to address from this whole period of his life when he’d been abandoned as a kid by his mother and father. “That therapy gave John permission to talk about things that were important to him that he never was able to put into songs before,” says DiLello, “that didn’t fit into the format of the band. It’s the result of your parents and your environment.” You are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. So I thought, ‘let’s try it’… In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life. Lennon was curious about a treatment where, as he put it, patients “get to do this thing and then they scream and feel better… OK, it’s something other than taking a tab of acid and feeling better.

The Californian psychotherapist treated Lennon and Yoko in London that spring, and then, over four months, in Bel Air in Los Angeles. That opened up the door for a completely different period in his life, letting out all the demons.” That almost-punk sound, notes the American, was emblematic of Lennon’s desire to plant a flag in a fresh musical direction, “especially in the wake of their sessions with Arthur Janov and primal scream therapy. On the other hand, Lennon wanted toboldly explore new places. There was a buzzsaw, punk sound almost to it.” And it was so different – coming after ‘Give Peace a Chance’, a hard-hitting statement, and the sonic landscape of that song was very different. “It was a powerful statement like you’d expect from John Lennon.

The spectacle ono beatles