The Lennons spent a family New Year at a rented farmhouse at Aalborg in northern Denmark with Yoko’s former husband, Tony Cox, his new wife, Melinda, and Kyoko, who was in Cox’s care. They must have enjoyed some of their time there because they stayed for over three weeks, but later they never talked much about it, other than to tell funny stories about the people they’d met there who believed in flying saucers.
Since they’d last seen him, Cox had ‘found God’ and become opposed to drugs, alcohol and cigarettes – which must have made it a New Year of some sobriety for John – and was now involved with a group who called themselves the Harbingers. One of the Harbingers talked John into being hypnotised in an effort to give up smoking, but it didn’t work. Nor did an attempt to get John to remember a past life. What did work was a pair of scissors applied by a local Danish girl in a barn, who made short work of his long hair, and Yoko’s too. In the world of JohnandYoko, what one did the other had to do as well. In a ritualistic sense, it seemed that they were both being shriven to begin the new decade. John looked better with his hair cropped, Yoko not so good. That bothered her.
While they’d been in Toronto the previous September, John had been in discussions about a free Peace Rock Festival to be held there the following July. But when the organisers flew to Denmark for further talks and John realised that the project wouldn’t be completely free, as tickets would cost a dollar each, he got angry. ‘Free means free,’ he insisted, worrying now that profit rather than peace might have been lingering at the back of the minds of some of the organisers. And when the Harbingers then talked about how they would fly John and Yoko to the festival in a psychic-powered car and that flying saucers would be landing at the event . . . that was enough. ‘He said he’d been on a flying saucer,’ John would relate, beaming. ‘But we wondered . . . if he was so spiritual, why was he so fat?’
He withdrew his name from the project, and he and Yoko returned to England carrying their shorn hair in a white plastic bag. Kyoko stayed with her father, Tony Cox, who was now loath to hand her over into the care of a couple who took drugs.
A January spent lying low in Denmark might have had some weird moments, but at least it meant that he wasn’t in England when an exhibition of his lithographs opened at the London Arts Gallery in Bond Street, Mayfair. It didn’t stay open for very long. After officers in plain clothes had mingled with the guests at an evening champagne reception, uniformed police arrived the next morning and spent three hours examining the drawings, before confiscating eight of them, including one depicting Yoko masturbating. They then charged the owners of the gallery under the Obscene Publications Act. Not surprisingly there was a rumpus in the press, which, although the charges were later withdrawn, did wonders for the value of the drawings. Originally on sale at £41 ($100) each, today they fetch up to £10,000 ($14,500) at auction.
John remained indifferent to the fuss and the fact that the police had ‘arrested some pieces of paper . . . It’s a laugh,’ he said. Ignoring the press ridicule, he decided it was time for a new single from the Plastic Ono Band. He called it ‘Instant Karma!’ and he wrote and recorded it in a single day, with George Harrison on lead guitar and Phil Spector, an old friend of Allen Klein’s, acting as producer. It wasn’t classic Lennon, although it did involve a very similar chord progression to ‘All You Need Is Love’. But it was joyous, had a Fifties-style echo and thumping bass and drums, and a chorus for everyone to sing along to. It would sell over a million copies in the US and John would promote it in the UK by singing live on BBC-TV’s Top Of The Pops as Yoko sat blindfolded and knitting – the significance of which was not immediately apparent.
But then, nor was the significance of John handing the bag of his and Yoko’s hair clippings over to Michael de Freitas at the Black House in return for an alleged pair of Muhammad Ali’s blood-smeared trunks. To those of us present it all seemed eerily phoney.
The shadow of heroin was lingering again, too. Yoko was pregnant, and, suffering complications, she was admitted to the private London Clinic in Harley Street, where John was given his own bed in her room. One winter’s Saturday afternoon while I was visiting, Michael de Freitas and a friend turned up with a large suitcase, inside of which was a gift of a large plastic bag full of marijuana. Even John was surprised by the amount.
But then de Freitas had reason to be grateful to him. He was awaiting trial on a charge of robbery and demanding money with menaces, with John having provided the bail money. Since only a couple of years earlier de Freitas had been in jail for eight months on another charge, his future probably looked precarious, and it hardly came as a surprise when a few months later he abandoned the Black House, jumped bail and took a flight to Trinidad.
That might have been the last John ever heard of the man who dreamed of being a revolutionary leader and called himself Michael X. That was not to be the case.
But for me that afternoon in the London Clinic was memorable for something other than the visit by de Freitas and his pal. John was always very careful not to admit to the use of hard drugs by either himself or Yoko outside the circle of people whom he knew were also doing drugs. I hadn’t known. So it was a surprise when, before de Freitas arrived, a nurse had been giving Yoko an injection, and John had suddenly exclaimed to the nurse: ‘She’s a junkie, you know.’ Anxious for Yoko, the protective cloak he always held around her, and her reputation, had momentarily slipped.
For months Paul had been absent, partly at the hideaway farm he’d bought himself on the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, kicking his heels, staying away from Apple and shunning the other Beatles whom he felt had betrayed him. His hope was that eventually he would get a call from John saying that he was ready to go back to work. But the call had never come.
‘I was bored,’ Paul told me. ‘I like to work. I’m an active person . . . I’d just got a new recording machine in my house and I found that I liked working alone.’ So over the winter of 1969–70 he wrote and recorded a whole album on his own, playing all the instruments himself.
But there was a snag. Following his successful work on ‘Instant Karma!’, Phil Spector had been asked by Allen Klein if he could salvage the Let It Be tapes that had been lying unreleased for over a year. Even back then, Phil Spector, who would later be imprisoned for murder, was often thought to be unhinged. But as a record producer, in his day, he was gifted, giving every song he touched the ‘Phil Spector treatment’, be it one by the Ronettes like ‘Be My Baby’ or the Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’. Working that way he’d had a lot of hits.
Now, given a Beatles album to remix and re-produce, he found himself able to take over two of Paul’s best songs, ‘Let It Be’ and ‘The Long And Winding Road’, and apply the Spector treatment to them, too – without having to ask the singer-songwriter’s permission.
This would be something new for Paul but by the spring of 1970 he had his solo album, McCartney, finished and ready for release, and Spector had fashioned the Let It Be tapes into a good Beatles album. The problem was Klein and John, not to mention United Artists, the distributors of the film of Let It Be, wanted the Beatles album released in March, and Paul wanted his album out then, too. It didn’t make sense for the two albums to be released almost together and therefore to be in competition with one another. But with emotions running as high as they were, sense didn’t always come into it.
At around this point, Paul was sent a remixed version of what Spector had done to ‘The Long And Winding Road’. He was horrified. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ he told me. ‘I would never have women’s voices on a Beatles record.’ When he complained to Klein he got a note back saying it was too late to make any further changes. ‘It’s no good me sitting here and thinking I’m in control,’ Paul raged, ‘because I’m obviously not.’
Heels were dug in. Looking for a way out of the impasse, John and George decided to send Ringo, who had never fallen out with any of the other Beatles, to Paul’s house with a letter from them. It read: ‘We’re sorry it turned out like this. It’s nothing personal. Love, John and George (Hare Krishna).’
For Paul it could hardly have been more personal. It seemed everyone was against him. John had wrecked the Beatles, then he’d brought in Allen Klein, whom Paul didn’t want, who had then brought in Phil Spector, whom Paul also did not want, who had then gone on to ruin one of his best songs. And now they were telling him he couldn’t release his solo album when he wanted to.
Screaming at Ringo, the inoffensive messenger, he threw him out of his house. At that, the other Beatles gave in. If it meant so much to Paul, they would let his album come out three weeks before the launch of the Let It Be album and film.
A week before the release of McCartney, Paul issued an ambiguous question-and-answer statement in which he admitted that he was neither planning a new Beatles album or single, nor could be foresee a time when he and John would become an active songwriting partnership again.
What he didn’t say was that he had ‘left’ the Beatles. He didn’t have to. The Daily Mirror, to whom the statement had been leaked, said it for him. ‘PAUL QUITS BEATLES’ ran the front-page headline on 10 April. At which point the world fell in around his head.
The questions and answers had been devised and intended as a clever piece of publicity for his solo album. But, unintentionally, it labelled Paul, who had done more than anyone to keep the Beatles alive, their destroyer. It was very ironic. Millions of fans around the world were aghast. How could Paul have done such a thing?
Nor was it only Beatles fans who were upset. Down at Tittenhurst Park, John was fuming. As he had started the Beatles, he had always assumed that he would be the one to finish them. He’d wanted to do it the previous September, but had been talked out of it by Allen Klein. Now Paul had grabbed the glory, as he saw it.
‘Why didn’t you write it when I told you in Canada at Christmas?’ he asked me that day.
‘You asked me not to,’ I replied.
‘You’re the journalist, Connolly, not me,’ he stabbed back.
Had Paul been a much-loved king who had abdicated, the convulsions of disappointment and accusations of betrayal that ran around the world that day couldn’t have been angrier. Paul’s nice-guy image was shattered. Quickly he tried to row back against the stream of vitriol. ‘It was all a misunderstanding,’ he told me. ‘I thought “Christ, what have I done? Now we’re for it,” and my stomach started churning up. I never intended the statement to mean “Paul McCartney quits Beatles”.’ But, whether he intended it or not, and John was convinced that he had, that was how it was perceived, and would be for many years.
There was now no going back. But with the break-up out in the open, all four could get on with the rest of their careers independently of each other if they so desired, leaving the unravelling of their interests to their legions of lawyers. That process would take years, during which John’s attitude towards Paul would be ever-changing.
For instance, while he was irritated that The Times music critic William Mann (‘that fucking idiot that wrote about Aeolian cadences’) gave Paul’s album McCartney a glowing review, John would also tell the ingratiating writer of a pop music paper who had criticised ‘Let It Be’ that it was ‘the best song in the charts’. It was, it seemed, all right for him to criticise Paul, but that was not always the case for anyone else. Equally, while occasionally amusing reporters by saying Paul’s records were like those of Engelbert Humperdinck, he would also often quickly point out that he had only ever chosen two people to work with, one was Yoko and the other was Paul, so ‘I can’t have been a bad judge of talent’. And when he felt that there was too much praise for George Harrison’s songs, he would angrily say to me, ‘Paul and me were the Beatles. We wrote the songs.’ A love-hate relationship doesn’t begin to describe how John felt about Paul. They’d been together for half their lives by the time the Beatles finally broke up. A mass collision of emotions was inevitably involved on both sides.
None of the Beatles attended the premiere of Let It Be on 8 May. They just couldn’t face the hoopla, and it was a bleak and unhappy spring for John and Yoko at Tittenhurst Park. According to the staff, the only excitement they had one week was when the donkeys they kept had escaped from the meadow. By this time, with most of the building work finished, the house was becoming more of a home, though one that was barely lived in. Life revolved around a huge kitchen and living area on the ground floor, manned by a cook, while secretaries, Sally and Diana, tried to keep up with the eccentricities of their employers. Elsewhere rooms were left empty or littered with records, rails of coats and bags of clothes, recording equipment, books, tapes, posters and instruments, dumped there by the removal men and never sorted by their owners. A rarely used pool table occupied another room that was lined with the unread leather-bound books that John had presumably claimed from Kenwood when his marriage to Cynthia had ended, while a white grand piano and stool would soon be the only furniture in one stately but otherwise empty sitting room.
A spiral staircase led from the kitchen to a landing, at the end of which was John and Yoko’s large all-purpose bedroom. There two giant stereo speakers, one of which had a framed copy of the Two Virgins photograph on top, stood sentinel at either side of a huge bed, at the foot of which was a large television that was rarely turned off or the sound turned on. It would be here that John and Yoko would spend much of their time.
They weren’t alone on their estate, with Yoko’s old friend Dan Richter and his wife Jill and their little boy Sacha living in one of the cottages, but whenever I visited it was impossible to escape the feeling that they might be lonely. John would always deny this, saying, ‘How can I be lonely when I’ve got Yoko?’ But then he would admit that they didn’t have many friends. His friends had been the Beatles and Neil and Mal, but they were the people he’d worked with, he would say.
There had been another problem with heroin that spring, John’s third, which he had overcome, and on sunny days he and Yoko would take a trip round the estate on a little electric golf cart, the two of them wearing ex-Royal Air Force greatcoats with the insignia torn off. John liked that look. ‘I always wanted to be an eccentric millionaire and now I am one,’ he told me one day, with a smile of satisfaction, as he looked back at his house and everything he owned.
What he needed, though, was some new inspiration. Then one day a parcel arrived from Apple. Among the constant legal papers that he was obliged to read was an advanced copy of a book called The Primal Scream by Los Angeles-based psychotherapist Arthur Janov.
Janov had insisted to his New York publishers ‘that as John was the most famous person in the world’ they should try to get a quote from him for the book’s jacket. It was a long shot, but it came off and Janov would end up with a lot more than a quote. No sooner had the book made its way to Tittenhurst Park than John became obsessed with it, as, over four hundred pages, Janov explored his theories on the root of neurosis through what he called primal therapy.
John hadn’t only found a new craze, but a new vocabulary, too. As Yoko had encouraged him to talk about himself as an ‘artist’, now Janov gave him a word to describe his feelings – ‘pain’. Through primal therapy – that is, by reaching into the child inside the adult to the point at which the patient is screaming in emotional anguish at uncovered memories – the secrets of neurosis could be unlocked. That was primal scream.
At John’s request, Yoko, who always manned the phones in the Lennon household, made a call to California. John needed to talk to this Arthur Janov.