[4 articles]
Christmas with John and Yoko
http://www.newstatesman.com/music/2009/12/john-lennon-interview-yoko
Maurice Hindle
17 December 2009
In December 1968, a year rocked by revolutionary upheaval, Maurice
Hindle and a fellow student hitch-hiked to John Lennon's home in
Surrey in search of the Beatle and his new partner, Yoko Ono. Here,
for the first time, we publish their interview
--
In 1968, I was 23 and approaching the end of my first term at Keele
University. On the afternoon of 2 December, I emerged with Daniel
Wiles, a fellow student, from Weybridge railway station into the
wintry stillness of Surrey's stockbroker belt, having hitch-hiked all
the way from Staffordshire. We were there to interview John Lennon
and Yoko Ono.
I had read about their first performance-art event together back in
June, when they planted acorns for peace at Coventry Cathedral, and
continued to be intrigued by the couple's exploits. Since then, John
and Yoko had been getting flak in the British press. That October,
they had been caught in a drugs bust at a flat in London belonging to
Ringo Starr. In the aftermath, Tariq Ali's radical newspaper Black
Dwarf published an angry "open letter", which accused Lennon of
selling out to the establishment and claimed that the Beatles' music
had "lost its bite". I felt it was time to counter the growing
feeling against John and Yoko, so I wrote to Lennon, via the magazine
Beatles Monthly, outlining my ideas for an interview. To my surprise,
he replied.
Outside Weybridge station, a Mini Cooper with smoked-glass windows
skidded to a halt, like something out of The Italian Job. In the
driver's seat was Lennon, looking much as he does in the colour
photograph included with the Beatles' 1968 White Album: faded blue
Levi's jacket, white T-shirt and jeans, dirty white sneakers, his
shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, and wearing the now famous
"granny glasses". We students crammed into the back of the Mini and
John drove us up the bumpy private road that led to his house, Kenwood.
In the sitting room at the back of the house, we sat down on
thick-pile Indian carpets around a low table, cross-legged. Yoko said
little, as we all knew this was primarily John's day - and he said a
lot. Apart from a short break, when Yoko fed us macrobiotic bread and
jams she had made, Lennon talked continuously for six hours. A short
extract from the interview was printed in UNIT, the Keele University
student magazine, but what follows has never previously been published.
What's your response to the attack on you and the Beatles in the
Black Dwarf letter?
He says "Revolution" was no more revolutionary than Mrs Dale's Diary.
So it mightn't have been. But the point is to change your head - it's
no good knocking down a few old bloody Tories! What does he think
he's gonna change? The system's what he says it is: a load of crap.
But just smashing it up isn't gonna do it.
The Feud: Lennon v the revolutionaries
In August 1968, the Beatles released the song "Revolution", in which
John Lennon expressed his unease at the violence of student
protesters who had taken to the streets across Europe and the US. Its
most telling couplet read: "When you talk about destruction/Don't you
know that you can count me out."
That October, Tariq Ali's Black Dwarf newspaper published a piece by
John Hoyland, an anti-Vietnam war campaigner, that accused the Beatle
of selling out. "Now do you see what's wrong with your record
'Revolution'?" asked Hoyland, referring to Lennon's recent arrest on
drugs charges. "In order to change the world we've got to understand
what's wrong with the world and then destroy it ruthlessly."
Incensed, Lennon demanded Black Dwarf publish his response, which
took Hoyland to task for his "patronising" tone, and ended with the
defiant challenge: "You smash it - and I'll build around it."
--------
John Lennon's lost six-hour interview
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/dec/17/john-lennon-lost-interview
Student's meeting with member of the Beatles in 1968 reveals furious
response to claims the group had sold out
Maev Kennedy
17 December 2009
It took more than 40 years, but John Lennon has finally got in his
furious response at having Revolution, one of his most famous songs
with the Beatles, unfavourably compared to the BBC radio drama Mrs
Dale's Diary.
The jibe that the Beatles had sold out to the establishment was made
in 1968 in a letter to Tariq Ali's radical journal Black Dwarf
which had concluded that the Beatles' mortal rivals, the Rolling
Stones, had superior radical credentials.
Now, an apparently forgotten interview reveals how Lennon felt about
the criticism at the time. "It's no good knocking down a few old
bloody Tories!" Lennon raged, at the end of a year when Europe had
been convulsed by student, trade union and political demonstrations
and strikes. "The system's a load of crap. But just smashing it up
isn't gonna do it."
Today's music fans will be stunned by the circumstances of the
interview: Lennon spoke for six hours at his home in Surrey,
sustained only by macrobiotic bread and jam made by Yoko Ono, to an
overawed first-year student from Keele University who had hitchhiked
hundreds of miles to meet him after applying by a letter sent to a
fan magazine.
A snippet was duly published in the Keele student magazine, but most
of the material stayed in the files of Maurice Hindle, now an author
completing a book on Lennon and an academic at the Open University
until today, when he finally publishes the full version in the New Statesman.
"Outside Weybridge station a Mini Cooper with smoked-glass windows
skidded to a halt like something out of The Italian Job. In the
driver's seat was Lennon, looking much as he does in the colour
photograph included with the Beatles 1968 White Album faded blue
Levi's jacket, white T-shirt and jeans, dirty white sneakers, his
shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, and , wearing the now
famous granny glasses.
"We students crammed into the back of the Mini and John drove us up
the bumpy private road that led to his house, Kenwood. In a sitting
room at the back of the house we sat down on thick-pile Indian
carpets around a low table, cross-legged. Yoko said little, as we all
knew this was primarily John's day and he said a lot.
Apart from a short break, when Yoko fed us macrobiotic bread and jam
she had made, Lennon talked continuously for six hours."
Lennon was enraged by the open letter by John Hoyland published in
Black Dwarf. The Beatles might have changed their image, but had lost
none of their fire, he insisted.
"OK so we mop-topped it to get where I am I'm here," he said.
"There have been millions of changes, of course, but I'm still doing
exactly the same thing I was doing at school, or at art school, and
as a Beatle. "I'm not going to get myself crucified if I can help it,
and so I've compromised. But I just want to see someone who hasn't,
and who's still alive.""I've always said that 'don't drop out man
just stay in and subvert it!'"
Memories of the altercation were revived last year when most of the
surviving protagonists were interviewed for various documentaries
marking the anniversary of the 1968 protests and uprisings.
John Lennon died on December 8 1980, shot on the doorstep of his
Dakota building home in New York by Mark Chapman - but by then had
long since made his peace with Tariq Ali, and regained his radical
laurels.The American journal Counterpunch four years ago finally
published in full a long 1971 interview by Ali and Robin Blackburn,
originally for the Trotskyist Red Mole, in which Lennon agreed with
Ali that he was becoming "increasingly radical and political".
There was nothing new about this, Lennon insisted. "I've always been
politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty
basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police
as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes
everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere."
--------
I interviewed John Lennon, and he was no ultra-left radical
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/02/lennon-lost-interview-radical-left
His association with 'serious revolutionaries' was brief and much regretted
Maurice Hindle
2 February 2010
You reported on the 1968 interview with John Lennon that I published
in the New Statesman, which revolved around Lennon's "furious"
response to a letter attacking him and his song Revolution for being
"unfavourably compared to the BBC radio drama Mrs Dale's Diary" (Day
in the life: Lennon's six-hour interview with student revealed, 17 December).
The article says Lennon was "enraged" by the letter, in "Tariq Ali's
radical journal" Black Dwarf. As you say, "The Beatles might have
changed their image, but had lost none of their fire, [Lennon]
insisted." And in January 1969, in his own letter to the magazine,
Lennon expressed irritation at being "ticked off" by "brothers in
endless fucking prose".
But in the actual conversation triggered when I showed him the
letter, which was so patronising I knew it was bound to get him going
Lennon's response was initially dismissive, unsurprising given that
this was the first time he'd seen it. He was not a regular reader of
Ali's ultra-left paper: in fact the open letter to him had appeared a
month before the interview.
But the idea that by the time John Lennon was shot dead in 1980 he
"had long since made his peace with Tariq Ali, and regained his
radical laurels", is wrong. It is true that Lennon flirted with the
left in the early 70s, mainly in New York, employing his song-writing
and rhetorical talents in the cause of justice and the promotion of peace.
It is therefore perhaps apt that you quote from the interview Lennon
did with Ali and Robin Blackburn for Red Mole in 1971, to the effect
that "Lennon agreed with Ali that he was becoming 'increasingly
radical and political'".
But that was 1971. Lennon's political radicalism was in fact a
relatively short-lived affair, as readers of his collection of
(mostly) late 1970s writings, Skywriting by Word of Mouth, will know.
Lennon much regretted his earlier association with the radical left,
as the contents of the chapter entitled "We'd all love to see the
plan" (quoting from the song Revolution) make clear.
Writing in 1978, he stated: "The biggest mistake Yoko and I made in
that period was allowing ourselves to become influenced by the
male-macho 'serious revolutionaries', and their insane ideas about
killing people to save them from capitalism and/or communism
(depending on your point of view). We should have stuck to our own
way of working for peace: bed-ins, billboards, etc."
Lennon's primary gift was for writing and recording songs that
communicate with millions in ways that no ideologically driven
political creed whether of the left or right ever could.
In the book I am writing about the relationship between Lennon's
songs and his life, I explore the communicating power of his music.
The book also draws on my recollections of the 75% of the Lennon
interview that has yet to be revealed your reporter could not know
that what appeared in the New Statesman is far from being "the full version".
--------
John Lennon's power for the people
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/02/john-lennon-radical-left-tariq-ali
Whether or not Lennon did regret his associations with the radical
left, I still remember his beliefs and his voice fondly
Tariq Ali
2 February 2010
Maurice Hindle's comments ('Response', The Guardian, 2 February,)
raise some interesting questions regarding John Lennon's politics.
For the record, it might be useful to point out that it was Lennon
who rang and wanted a conversation, a year after the 1969 exchange on
the Beatle's album Revolution in the "ultra-left" Black Dwarf. We met
a number of times before the interview that Robin Blackburn and I
conducted for the even more "ultra-left" Red Mole.
The day after the interview he rang me and said he had enjoyed it so
much that he'd written a song for the movement, which he then
proceeded to sing down the line: Power to the People. The events in
Derry on Bloody Sunday angered him greatly and he subsequently
suggested that he wished to march on the next Troops Out
demonstration on Ireland, and did so, together with Yoko Ono, wearing
Red Mole T-shirts and holding the paper high. Its headline was: "For
the IRA, Against British Imperialism".'
We stayed in touch and talked to each other a great deal. He invited
Blackburn and myself over when Imagine was being composed. I vividly
remember him singing it at the kitchen table in Tittenhurst and then
looking at us inquiringly. "The Politburo approves this one," I
joked. Later, the LP arrived and most of the songs in it were radical
in the broad sense of the word (as was Working Class Hero from his
previous album). Imagine, the utopian hymn, written during his most
radical phase, was never repudiated and while he may have regretted
some of his actions and remarks in the 1970s that song continued to
represent his political hopes.
What has often been underestimated is the radical influence that Yoko
Ono represented in both art and politics. She had a huge impact on
his ideas and, even in the late 70s, told him off in public for being
too dismissive of his radicalism. When he told me he was moving to
the United States, I tried to dissuade him.
"Too many kooks," I said.
"Not in Manhattan," was his response.
He wanted to leave Britain because he and Yoko were repulsed by its
provincialism and by the tenor of tabloid racism that was directed
against her. I last spoke with him in 1979 when we discussed the
likely impact of Thatcher's victory. He didn't sound too unradical in
that conversation. If there is a record of it in some British
intelligence archive, I would be grateful to see a transcript.
Clearly, his views changed somewhat but I can't see him as a neocon
supporting the wars and occupations in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The loss of his voice was a tragedy for millions.
.
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