Yoko Ono: “..Back to where she once belonged..”
“..Yoko Ono is forever associated with the Beatles, yet her aristocratic family life in imperial Japan, long before she met John Lennon, was equally intriguing.
For the first time, she opens up the Ono family album
She may not look it, but Yoko Ono, a woman who has survived three decades of tragedy, debunking and myth, is now 77 years old.
For many of those years, she has been blamed, perhaps unfairly, for the break-up of the world’s best-loved musical partnership: ..
.. she was the woman who came between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, insisting on being in the studio as the band disintegrated.
She also cradled Lennon just a few seconds after the fatal shots from a revolver rang out on a cold New York night in December 1980.
As she has grown older she has become — perhaps inevitably — more reflective about her past.
She has mellowed and in recent years visits to Japan have become more frequent.
She returned with Lennon several times in the 1970s at a point in his life when he had all but disappeared from public view.
Yoko is back in Japan for a three-week trip and, for the first time, has agreed to a journalist accompanying her to write about this side of her multi-faceted life.
This is also the first time she has agreed to open up in depth about her childhood, her awkward, distant upbringing in a quasi-aristocratic family in Tokyo, and Lennon’s relationship with her parents.
Only now is she truly comfortable returning to Japan.
The journeys back with Lennon were sporadic, and sometimes difficult.
When Lennon came here with Yoko for the first time in 1971 — just a year after the break-up of the Beatles — he was surprised to find that his monumental fame cut no ice with his in-laws.
The couple had known each other for four years, but Lennon had only the smallest inkling of Yoko’s social status .. and made no effort to ingratiate himself.
“He just went to my parents’ place unshaven, and wearing an army-surplus coat,” she says.
“Just the most hip outfit, very rock’n’roll!
I mean, rock’n’roll can be a performance in a theatre, a beautiful, gorgeous thing.
But he was just looking like a bum.
This kind of ‘here I am’ attitude.
“My family was not enamoured.
If some families had a son or a daughter involved with the Beatles, maybe they would say, ‘We’d like to meet that guy, we’d like to be invited to a Beatles concert.’
There was none of that, of course.”
Yoko explains that she came from exalted, upper-class stock to whom the Beatles were irrelevant.
Both her socialite, feminist mother and banker father were scions of families with high-level imperial, political, industrial and financial connections..”
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