Yoko Ono is, for once, in a buoyant mood. Her opening gambit — “Isn’t it
great?” — is not really a question; more a bubbly effusion reflecting the
overwhelmingly good reviews that her album Yes, I’m a Witch has been
receiving. Her excitement is understandable. Over the past 40 of her 74
years, favourable press write-ups of her music have been about as rare as
votes of thanks from the Beatles fan club. Most of the coverage she has
received has trodden a line similar to the one recently taken by her former
chauffeur. (Koral Karsan is awaiting trial on a charge of extortion because
of a letter he sent her before Christmas threatening to publicise
embarrassing photos and audio tapes unless she paid him $2m.)
At last, though, it seems that the tide may, just may, be turning in Ono’s
favour. The new collection of 17 remixes of tracks culled from her career
with and without, during and after her time with, John Lennon, has revealed,
among other things, the regard in which Ono’s music is held by a younger
generation of high-achieving left-fielders. “I didn’t know about any of
these artists before,” Ono says, on the phone from her office in New York.
“Indie music seems like a revolution to me. It’s the future now.”
The Flaming Lips, the Canadian electroclash provocateuse Peaches and
Jason Pierce of Spiritualized are just three of the bands and musicians who
have remodelled songs from her extensive catalogue, supplying new
accompaniments to Ono’s inimitable vocals. At the time of their release, few
paid much attention to her 10 solo albums, and her various recordings with
her husband fared little better. Lennon once described his wife as “the
world’s most famous unknown artist”. Ono herself now concedes that “the only
thing that interested people about John’s and my Two Virgins album was the
cover” (on which the couple appeared naked). But, as was famously the case
with the Velvet Underground, it seems the few who did bother to listen all
started making experimental pop music of their own.
When he first heard Ono’s music, around the time he formed Spiritualized, 17
years ago, Pierce was, he says, “floored by her take on how to deliver a
song. She’s expressive in a way that’s very difficult to do in rock’n’roll.
She just lets go. She uses her voice as an instrument”. Pierce also rates
her as a songwriter. He chose to adapt Walking on Thin Ice — the song Ono
recorded with Lennon on the night he died — as a riposte to various recent
dance remixes of the track by artists such as Pet Shop Boys and the Orange
Factory. “I wanted to bring out its inherent sadness. It’s just
extraordinary music.”
Wayne Coyne, leader of the Flaming Lips, went with one of Ono’s earliest
avant-garde performances with the Plastic Ono Band. Cambridge 1969 features
her screaming like a scalded cat. “To play with a track as uncompromising
and confrontational as that, for any curious artist, is a rare treat,” Coyne
says. “We took Yoko’s primal screams and John’s moaning feedback and turned
them into a kind of Ornette Colemanesque melody.” Coyne worries that “we may
have defanged rock’s most disturbing performance-art jam”. Ono, however,
considers that “it came out beautifully”.
Peaches, one of several female performers to have contributed to Yes, I’m a
Witch, was captivated as a teenager by Ono’s music. “It’s so unique and
outspoken. I was surprised how strong it was. But that’s down to her
background in conceptual art, which is always in advance of pop culture.”
Peaches decided to remake Kiss Kiss Kiss (from Double Fantasy), “because
it’s driven by handclaps and a minimal backing, which sounded weird at the
time but is now used on lots of hip-hop records”. She also believes that Ono
was prescient in her take on femi-nism. “She turned up at a feminist
conference in the 1970s dressed all in pink, and everybody was horrified.
Yoko thought feminists should be feminine. She was decades ahead of the rest
of us.”
For her part, Ono believes she was a bit ahead of herself. “Most people think
I’m a control freak or whatever, and I have been a bit like that where my
recent music is concerned. But I’m not that sort of person. I usually take a
situation and work with it, rather than saying, ‘It has to be this way.’ I
see this album as an attempt at realising the unfinished music project I
started in the 1960s.”
The rare reference to her life before she met Lennon is a nod to the great
exponent of the principle of randomness in music, the composer John Cage.
Along with the free-jazz trumpeter Ornette Coleman, he was her friend and
collaborator on the avant-garde music scene in New York, which she inhabited
in her twenties. The conceptual art projects which hypnotised Lennon were
actually a spin-off from a career that began when she was three, after her
father packed her off to a music school for precocious super-toddlers in
Tokyo. When his plan for her to become a concert pianist foundered — “I was
frightened with the way he went about it; he was so hard-hitting” — she
suggested training as a composer. Ono pãre disapproved on the
grounds that he had never heard of any famous female composers, and they
compromised. She was taught to sing instead, opera and German lieder,
mainly, “which helped me later with some of the vocal things I was doing,
which needed a lot of endurance”.
In New York, she gained a reputation as the sort of musical maverick we would
now probably call a performance artist, “which wasn’t right; I was giving a
concert a month, but nothing was by design. I just had a strange fate of
bumping into people”. The big bump with Lennon was not, according to Ono, a
smart career move. “In a way, both John and I ruined our careers by getting
together, though we weren’t aware of it at the time.” First, she led him
deeper into experimental music: the use of tape cut-ups, musique concrãte
and the great swirls of electronic noise on Revolution No 9 from the
Beatles’ White Album were an early example of the Yoko effect. But it was
never her plan, she insists, to hijack her husband’s career. “My initial
reaction to rock music was, ‘Oh dear, how simple can you get?’ At first, I
thought John would carry on with the Beatles and I would do my own things,
but he felt it wasn’t right that we were working separately, that the union
we had might not last, because of the pressure of the world.”
So, while remaining, in her own estimation, “a fiercely independent person”,
Ono did less of the screaming voice-modulation and what she mysteriously
calls “kitchen-sink Japanese moaning”, and moved in a rockier direction. “It
inspired me, and freed me. A grande dame of experimental music is
not something I wanted to be.”
Pursuing a solo career while living in the Dakota building with an ex-Beatle
wasn’t easy. She tells of having to compose on an almost inaudible electric
piano, or with headphones, or just in her head, usually late at night. “It
wasn’t like John saying, ‘You’d better write your stuff while I’m asleep’,
but he was used to everybody else just washing the dishes and not making a
noise while he was doing his songs.”
The effort, though, was clearly worth it. Even a tune she thought of as a
throwaway item, Toyboat, which she wrote while deeply depressed after
Lennon’s death, has now been rather beautifully restored by Antony Hegarty
(of Antony and the Johnsons). “I’d completely forgotten I’d written that.
Now I listen to it and think, ‘Oh, you poor dear .. .’ ”
Not that she is looking for our sympathy. In 2007, Ono comes across as a
charmingly batty septuagenarian whose weird proclivities have not faded with
age. “Some of the vocal things I do, I don’t know where they’re coming
from,” she says, then lets out a series of piercing squawks that make the
phone receiver rattle in my hand. “Maybe in my last life I was Spanish or
something.”
