45

‘We’ve got about two LPs’ worth of songs, so get your drums out’

For a moment, John seemed to stumble in his certainty. When Cynthia returned home after staying with Jennie Boyd and her house mate Magic Alex – who, Cynthia would say, had made an unsuccessful pass at her – there was no sign of Yoko, and John acted as though everything was normal. When Cynthia asked what was happening with her, he simply said, ‘Nothing. It’s not important,’ and avoided any discussion of Yoko. That night, according to Cynthia, they had sex again for the first time in many months.

Soon, however, the coldness returned. A family holiday in Pesaro in Italy with her mother, Julian and an uncle and aunt had been planned for May. She thought about cancelling it, but John pressed her to go. Counting the two months in India, and her break in Greece, it would be her third holiday in three months.

Yoko moved into Kenwood on the day Cynthia went to Italy. She’d left Tony Cox for good, leaving Kyoko in his care. ‘We were both so excited about discovering each other, we didn’t stop to think about anyone else’s feelings,’ she later said. ‘We just went ahead, gung ho. What we had was more precious than anything else.’

It didn’t take long for the new couple to go public. Less than a week later, on 22 May 1968, they took the opportunity to show off their relationship to the press at an afternoon reception at a crowded Aretusa nightclub on Chelsea’s King’s Road. The event had been planned to publicise the opening of yet another tentacle of the ever-expanding Apple Corps octopus of businesses, Apple Tailoring. But their presence hijacked the event. Yoko clung to John’s protective arm throughout, as reporters and photographers mobbed them. John just scowled, as if trying to pretend the press weren’t there. Neither answered questions thrown in their direction. But the statement they were making was clear for all to see. While ‘John and Cyn’ might have been the casual way John had signed postcards to their friends, ‘John and Yoko’ quickly became a statement that they were something more than an item. They were a brand – JohnandYoko – and Yoko had finally got her wish. She was becoming famous.

For the next three and a half years of their lives in Britain – before they moved permanently to New York in 1971 – John and Yoko would practically never be seen apart, with John throwing his energies into not only promoting Yoko and her work, but in publicising his new persona as one half of JohnandYoko. With the Beatles he’d always seen himself as the front man, but now he began to subsume his personality into that of Yoko – one of the first artistic enterprises they conducted being to make a film that merged their faces into each other’s. It was pure narcissism, but it was also the clearest sign of John beginning to completely reinvent himself. Yoko wasn’t now simply giving instructions at her happenings. With John never away from her side, she and he became an event in itself, and soon they would begin to dress accordingly in matching white suits, both parting their long hair down the middle.

For John, it really was a matter of ‘I am he as you are he as you are me and we are altogether’, as he’d sung in ‘I Am The Walrus’. Tony Barrow, who was no longer acting as the Beatles’ publicist since the arrival of Derek Taylor at Apple, would say that from this moment he barely recognised John as the person he’d known for the past five years.

In sunny Pesaro, on the Italian Adriatic coast, Cynthia had been blithely unaware of her husband’s public abandonment of her until, returning to her hotel one evening, she found Magic Alex waiting outside. He’d been sent from London with a message from her husband.

‘John is going to divorce you, take Julian away from you, and send you back to Hoylake,’ she would say he told her.

This time, Cynthia knew her marriage was finished. Yoko had won, and John had once more ducked out of any confrontation by sending a messenger with the bad news. That was what he’d done when he’d sent Nigel Walley to tell Eric Griffiths that he was no longer wanted in the Quarry Men; and what had happened when Brian was given the task of sacking Pete Best. John would always tell how he was the spokesman for the Beatles when they felt they were being badly treated. But when it came to banishing someone from his life, he’d send a messenger.

Meanwhile work had already begun on the new Beatles LP – the one we would get to know as the White Album, although, as no better title had been agreed, it would be listed simply as The Beatles. ‘We’ve got about two LPs’ worth of songs, so get your drums out’ John had written on a postcard from India to early-leaver Ringo – so hopes were high.

Things, however, had changed. Ever since the Beatles had first gone into Abbey Road, outsiders had been unwelcome when they’d been recording, and that had included Brian Epstein as well as their girlfriends and later wives. But now, as John and Yoko were inseparable, the Beatle’s rhythm guitar player insisted that she be with him in the studio at all times.

Paul immediately found Yoko’s presence inhibiting. The Beatles had developed a way of working over several years. Any intrusion into this tightly knit team had to be disturbing. And Yoko, who before she’d become involved with John had often opined that she didn’t like rock and roll music and believed it to be culturally crude, was not necessarily someone whose advice would be welcomed or valued. For her to immediately believe that she could make suggestions in a field she knew nothing about had to be unsettling.

The major casualty of Yoko’s arrival was the Lennon and McCartney writing relationship as Paul now found it difficult in the presence of this arty newcomer. Paul gave a very good example of his frustration at Yoko’s presence when he told me: ‘If I started to think of a line, I’d begin to get very nervous. I might want to say something like “I love you, girl”, but with Yoko watching I always felt that I had to come up with something clever and avant-garde . . . John and I tried writing together a few more times, but I think we both decided it would be easier to work separately.’

At the same time, part of the Beatles’ distinctive sound, notably of Paul singing a few lines of a lyric a third above John, was also lost. ‘I would love to have sung harmony with John then, and I think he would have liked me to,’ Paul went on, ‘but I was too embarrassed to ask him.’ As he freely admitted, he was annoyed with John, and jealous of Yoko. John now had a new friend to play with in a game that had become dangerously threatening. ‘I was afraid about the possibility of a break-up of a great musical partnership,’ Paul said. He had good reason to worry.

Whether or not Yoko was welcome at the sessions, the array of new songs to be recorded was evidence of an astonishing outburst of creative energy all round. John had eleven new songs, including ‘Glass Onion’, ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ and ‘Julia’ – which was about his mother. Paul had seven, among them ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ and ‘I Will’. While among George’s five was one of his best ever, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, which was so good he asked his friend, a nervous Eric Clapton, to play lead guitar for him on it.

Not everything that the Beatles began recording that summer would be released on the resulting double LP. Some songs were held over and re-recorded, or even rewritten, for the group’s later solo albums. But for John, they represented some of his best work so far. Sgt. Pepper might have hit a new peak, but the new songs were less muddied by musical artifice and lyrical gobbledegook than those of the previous year. He was now writing more plainly about himself and his feelings, which was the style he enjoyed most.

He had, however, lost none of his knack of catching the moment in music. By 1968 the world’s preoccupation had changed from the love and peace of the previous year to revolt. Chairman Mao was turning China upside down with his Red Guards, in Paris students were taking to the streets in protest, and the Stars and Stripes was being burned on campuses across America in protest at the war in Vietnam. Revolution was in the global air, from Czechoslovakia to Chicago, and ‘Revolution’, John decided, would be the title of the next Beatles single.

Two different versions were recorded, one for a single and another for the album – not to mention an unreleased ten-minute jam that included a great deal of racket and roar intended to represent the chaos of an actual revolution, and to which Yoko contributed in her own howling way.

John was keen to get the song exactly right. But, although there were minor changes to the lyrics in the different versions, the general theme was less about revolt and more about moderation. ‘When you talk about destruction . . . don’t you know you can count me out,’ he sang, which hardly sounds like a battle cry.

Some counter-culture movements were disappointed that the great confronter John Lennon didn’t want to tear capitalism apart, but John was unimpressed. ‘I’m sick of those aggressive hippies or whatever they are,’ he said. ‘They frighten me . . . a lot of uptight maniacs going around wearing fucking peace symbols.’

The sessions for the White Album ran from May until October with only Ringo diplomatically not earning John’s ire in his behaviour towards Yoko. Even he, though, couldn’t fail to be affected by the strained atmosphere, and in mid-August he walked out, becoming the first Beatle to do so, leaving Paul to play drums on ‘Back In the USSR’ and ‘Dear Prudence’. It was the first split in the Beatles’ hitherto solid foundation and came just under a year since the death of Brian Epstein. Ringo returned a week later, to find flowers all around his drum kit, but he had made his point. The fun was going out of being a Beatle.

The days of all four working together as a creative ensemble were passing. With the White Album, they were becoming a backing band, with the writer of the song singing and the other three providing the accompaniment. As John would say, the Beatles were now ‘just me and a backing group . . . Paul and a backing group . . .’

Things may have been often fraught at Abbey Road, but outside the recording studio the JohnandYoko brand was beginning to take off. There was Yoko’s event at the Robert Fraser Gallery when 365 white helium balloons were released into the air bearing the message ‘You are here’; and then the public showing of a film of a minute of John smiling. Filmed with a very high-speed camera, when shown it was projected at the usual 35 frames a second, which meant it lasted for over half an hour.

It seemed to most critics that such events were no more than Yoko’s vanity projects that John was funding, and interest in them was low to non-existent. For JohnandYoko to really catch the wider public’s imagination they were going to have to do something seriously outrageous.

From a distance, Cynthia would now read about a man she didn’t recognise, as her husband dived into what looked to her like a nonsense-filled pool of conceptual art. ‘I couldn’t believe all the love-ins and the bag-ins he did with Yoko,’ she would later tell me. ‘This was overwhelmingly a takeover of John’s mind and creativity. I think he left his brain behind. It was between his legs for a time.’