![]() "But John really took to my way of singing." There's a tape somewhere of John saying: 'Are you getting that?'" She laughs. But they thought: 'How dare she?' So when I was doing a recording, even the engineers all went to bathroom. I was aware that I was doing something unique and important. Why should we be ashamed of it, or treated differently? Of course, when I started to show it, most people thought it was terrible. So I thought we have to show what women are - we're the birthgivers of the human race. ![]() They don't want a woman to sound too strong. And I thought: Why is woman always known for pretty voice and pretty songs? Because that's what the world wants. And she was going: 'Ahh! - ahhh! - ahhh! ahhh!' Well, I got scared and I ran away. One was talking about her aunt in hospital giving birth. She tells me: "When I was a very, very young girl, my mother said: 'Don't ever go to the servants' room because they're talking about things that you shouldn't know.' Well, that's a fine introduction! So I slipped out and went very near the room and heard these two young girls. Most of us have wondered what was going on with her voice, which I can find thrilling or jarring, depending on the context and my mood. ![]() Her art can be funny, empowering and warm - or naive, clichéd and vain. She evades questions, offering polite platitudes and gnomic smiles. She is cryptic, conceptual and confusing, and as we talk it becomes clear she has no interest in making my understanding of her any easier. "John Rennon's Excrusive Gloupie" ran one notorious 1970 Esquire headline over a caricature of her and Lennon.īut this does not mean that finding her singing unbearable, or her art empty and pretentious, necessarily makes you racist or sexist. There was clearly sexism and racism at work in the media portrayals of her. Fans blamed her for breaking up the greatest band in history (it took Paul McCartney until his 2012 interview with David Frost to unequivocally state that she was not responsible). Whether publicly bedding down, banging a drum, or ululating wildly beside her husband, Ono became a lightning rod for attitudes both to women and to avant garde art. A lot of the lyrics and the concept came from Yoko, but in those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted her contribution, but it was right out of Grapefruit." "If she won't be a slave, we say that she don't love us/ If she's real, we say she's trying to be a man." Lennon's most famous solo song was inspired by a poem from Ono's Grapefruit book, published before they met: "Imagine the clouds dripping, dig a hole in your garden to put them in."Īlthough he took all the songwriting credit, Lennon later said that it "should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song. "We make her paint her face and dance," they sang in 1972. In a counterculture context in which the avant garde were against everything, her positivity appealed to his quirky sense of humour - and they fell in love.Īs a "Beatle wife", Ono helped her husband to acknowledge his former chauvinism and the pair ended up writing songs like the controversialWoman is the Nigger of the World. Through the glass he read the word "YES" printed in tiny letters. He climbed a ladder leading up to a canvas suspended from the ceiling and a spyglass hanging from it on the end of a chain. The first woman admitted to the philosophy programme at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, she challenged cultural perceptions of female passivity through the music and performance art she was making long before she met her third husband, Lennon, when he attended one of her exhibitions in 1966. Her line-up includes women like Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith and Marianne Faithfull, who, she says, has "created something incredible with her voice". ![]() Ono is in London in her role as curator of this year's Meltdown Festival, which places an accent on "pure 'female' energy" in particular. "If you don't have it, don't bother with rock and roll." "Energy is so important," she likes to say. She looks over the brims like a playful librarian, then springs up from the sofa of her luxurious hotel suite with such vim that it is hard to believe the woman John Lennon described as "the world's most famous unknown artist" turned 80 earlier this year (on February 18). THE afternoon is overcast and we are inside.īut Yoko Ono is still wearing a pair of shiny black shades.
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