Radio Yoko

The sun has gone down on Friday 3 May 1968. In Paris, French riot police have cleared the Sorbonne of students and are pursuing protestors, amid a hail of cobblestones, through the night. In Washington, Chicago and Baltimore, cops are keeping an uneasy peace after weeks of rioting following the assassination of Martin Luther King. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong have launched the May offensive, detonating a bomb at Saigon University and beginning the deadliest month of the war for US forces. In Prague, Russian agents quietly plot the Soviet invasion.

But in sleepy London Town the suburbs are snoring. Except for John Winston Lennon, at home in Weybridge, in deepest Surrey. John has been fretting. Who knows what cocktail of pharmaceuticals he grabbed from the jar by the bed this morning - uppers, downers, acid or Mandrax - but he can’t sleep. He’s been jangled, discombobulated ever since he got back from India. Earlier today he convened a band meeting at the new Apple offices on Wigmore Street and gravely informed his fellow Beatles that he was the living reincarnation of Jesus Christ. They seemed to accept this news, and decided it called for a few drinks.

Cynthia is away, summarily despatched off to Greece with Pattie Boyd and Magic Alex, and John fancies, he tells his housemate, onetime Quarryman Pete Shotton, some female company. As if the drugs weren’t enough, all day he’s been scrambling his brain, catching up on his correspondence with the avant garde artist Yoko Ono.

She’s been writing to him for a while now, ever since the night, back in November 1966 when, looking to score some kind of thrill from John Dunbar and the heads at the Indica Gallery, he wandered into the set up of her first London exhibition. He had learned a thing or two about Dada and surrealism from Stuart Sutcliffe, back in the beatnik squalor of Gambier Terrace, but this was something else. An all white chess set. A fresh green Granny Smith on a plexiglass pedestal, for sale: £200. Blank canvases to walk over or to paint yourself. 

He’s used to playing the bluff hooligan in these situations, pouring scouse scorn on the conceptual indulgence of the avant garde, but something about it all tickled him. He fancied accepting the invitation on one canvas to hammer in a few nails, but the show wasn’t open yet - everything had to remain immaculate, pristine. Unless of course, he’s advised, he would like to pay five shillings for the privilege? 

“How’s about I pay you five imaginary shillings and I hammer in an imaginary nail?” 

He said this locking eyes with the tiny Japanese artist, all in black with a canopy of long hair, a gothic willow tree in the shape of a woman, and had the odd sensation he was dialling in to some elusive pirate station, Radio Yoko, on a secret wavelength he’d been seeking for a long, long time.

He’s stayed tuned in ever since. Even when she was in Belgium showing a film of people’s bums,  or Paris, jamming with Ornette Coleman, whether he was in a chip shop in Taunton or an ashram in Rishikesh, they’ve stayed peculiarly connected. She would send him postcards, inviting him to a dance festival in the mind, with instructions to “breathe at midnight” and “breathe at dawn”. On his 27th birthday last October he received the simple message “Wait for the spring to come. Let us know when it comes’.  

Tonight, looking out at the waxing crescent moon through the Surrey drizzle, he feels like spring is finally here. The time has come. He’s phoned up Yoko and issued his own instruction: take a taxi immediately from Regents Park to Kenwood. Her daughter Kyoko, is away with her husband, Tony Cox. Little Julian has been packed off with Dot the housekeeper. Hopefully he has some cash stashed somewhere in the house to pay the cabbie.

He had made a big song and dance, on the flight back from Delhi, of confessing to Cyn the full sorry litany of his failings as a husband, the casual infidelities, the trail of disgrace, from Mathew Street to Shea Stadium. He’s had, to the best of his calculations, over a thousand - groupies, call girls, chamber maids. But strangely, as he awaits Yoko’s arrival, he feels nervous as a virgin.

Does he just want to sleep with her? Pete or Mal could surely rustle up an eager dollybird or two with much less fuss? Just the other week no less than Brigitte Bardot had requested an audience and he had chastely sat on the floor of her Mayfair suite, tripping gently by her beautiful feet.

Maybe what he really wants, he thinks as he flicks one more time through his copy of Grapefruit, the book of prompts and mindgames Yoko had sent him last year, is a way out. 

In the times when he’s not thinking he’s Jesus Christ, John feels like Elvis Presley, or some other King  - one more, fat, overindulged monarch, tied to his throne, surrounded by courtiers and yes men and supplied with whatever flesh or fancy might still tickle his jaded palate. This woman, this artist, this Yoko Ono may be the first person in the past six years who hasn’t flattered his god almighty imperial ego, who has instead insisted that, despite all his psychedelic finery, he is in fact stark fucking hairy bollock naked. 

He had tried to find a way out of the palace - flying off to make films in Spain, following the Maharishi to the foothills of the Himalayas, frying his ego in acid. But wherever he wandered, it all turned out to be just another wing in the vast, impermeable estate of his celebrity.

Does Yoko have the key? The door bell rings, two clouds pass across the moon, and John is remembering the word he spied through the magnifying glass at the top of the white ladder on the ceiling that night at the Indica Gallery back in 1966. Yes, he mutters to himself as he opens the door. Yes.