She can laugh about it now, but in 1974, when she wrote a song called Yes, I’m a Witch , it can’t have been much fun being Yoko Ono. In fact, Ono was eventually dissuaded from releasing the song, lest, presumably, someone take it upon themselves to burn her. By the time it appeared on 1992’s Onobox retrospective, the song’s premonition — “It’s gonna change, sweetie-legs” — was slowly coming true. Ono can name her new remix album after that tune and we are all in on the joke. Any dissenters risk having Sonic Youth personally knock on their door and administer a thorough talking-to.

Cementing her hard-won status as iconic art-rocker, the roll call of bands who fancied a turn at remixing a tune from her back catalogue is impressive. In the care of Antony Hegarty and Hahn Rowe, the still twilit yearning of Toyboat benefits from a newfound sense of motion, swelling to a pulsating climax.

Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce erases John Lennon’s chirpy remark — “I think you’ve got your first No 1, Yoko” — at the beginning of Walking on Thin Ice , and not without good reason. What, in its original form, has become a leftfield club classic is transformed into, well . . . a tick-all-the-boxes Spiritualized song, from the atonal synth drone to the muffled mantric drums.

But it’s not all quite as good as that. When postRiot Grrrl popsmiths Le Tigre give Sisters O Sisters a meaty electro-pop overhaul, it merely serves to make you long for the rad-fem bubble-gum whimsy of the original. By comparison, what Cat Power does with 1995’s Revelations is a lot less dramatic.

She takes a floating acoustic meditation and replaces it with a simple sweet piano accompaniment that, peculiarly, sounds like just the sort of thing John Lennon might have sketched out on his big white Imagine piano.

Enough, then, of the lingering cliché that Ono’s facility for a melody was inferior to that of her husband. In the 1960s, that might have been true. In the 1970s, though, it was a close call. It’s precisely Ono’s strengths as a tune-smith to which the best tracks on Yes, I’m A Witch play. Thanks to Peaches, Kiss Kiss Kiss — a song whose orgasmic grunts make Je T’Aime sound glacially offhand by comparison — has the futuristic treatment for which it always longed. Reworked by the Apples In Stereo, Nobody Sees Me Like You Do is magnified into an epic of Spectoreque sadness.

Having been ignored for so long, the deeply human qualities in Ono’s music have been teased out heroically on much of Yes, I’m A Witch .

Though it’s now tempting to go to the other extreme and hail Ono as a suffragette throwing stones through the windows of pop, the voice here belongs to a far more complex individual. Fearless avant-gardist; elephant in the room during the Beatles’ break-up; peace campaigner; the woman who allowed Nike to make a John Lennon trainer in the name of “individuality” — it all points to one conclusion. If proud Britpop proletarians such as Oasis and Richard Ashcroft continue to give praise to John Lennon because “he just didn’t give a f***”, then they should be worshipping Yoko Ono as a goddess.

(Parlophone)

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