‘Oh Yoko!’: how did John Lennon meet Yoko Ono?
Imagine a world where John Lennon and Yoko Ono never met. To a particularly irritating subsect of music fans, they’d call that a dream. For the people who still like to claim that Ono’s mere presence caused the breakdown of The Beatles, the thought of the couple never meeting unlocks a whole number of imaginary scenarios about what or where the band might be today. But in reality, without Yoko Ono, the story of John Lennon and The Beatles would be endlessly less interesting as their love was endlessly inspiring.
Within Ono, chances are that John Lennon would never have become the experimental force he was on the band’s final albums. The people who discredit Ono as a mere nuisance to the group forget the fact that long before the couple met and long before the Liverpudlian lads had even begun their own sonic experimentation, Ono had already made her name for herself as a leading force in the world of multimedia art, including playing a major role in the performance and sonic art scene.
From the early 1950s, when Ono moved to New York, she moved in circles of avant-garde artists, boundary pushes, and history-shaking creatives working across several different forms. She existed in the same world as John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, Nam June Paik and countless other artists who couldn’t be easily categorised as they used their work to explore new and interesting veins.
Long before she met Lennon, she’d hosted several notable performances in prestigious venues. She was a known and respected name in her field. Even in 1966, on the fateful trip to London, Ono was there on her own business as the only woman selected to perform her own works in Gustav Metzger’s Destruction in Art Symposium in September. After impressing people there, the team behind the city’s influential Indica Gallery, a meeting place for artistic countercultural forces, invited her to host her solo show, where two musicians just happened to walk in…
So, where did John Lennon meet Yoko Ono?
Indica Gallery was the type of place where people wanted to be seen, and people wanted to be. Just off Duke Street in London’s St James’ area, the venue was a bookshop, a gallery, a venue and a general buzzing meeting place for artistic types. It was owned by John Dunbar, Barry Miles and, crucially, Peter Asher, the brother of Paul McCartney’s long-term girlfriend, Jane Asher.
So, in November, when Ono was invited to host a solo exhibit and the gallery was becoming an exciting hotspot, McCartney encouraged Lennon to come along and check it out, changing his life forever with one invite.
It was the day before the exhibit when the two Beatles went along. Set up and ready for the public opening, all of Ono’s signature immersive pieces that encouraged interaction were untouched. One of them was a wooden board with a hammer and nails ready to be hit into the wall. Lennon’s hands itched to do it, so he turned to the artist, asked if he could start it off, and haggled for the opportunity, even though she said no.
He paid five shillings to be able to hit the first nail into the board, and that was the start of it. “That’s when we locked eyes, and she got it, and I got it, and, as they say in all the interviews we do, the rest is history,” Lennon said of that moment when he met Yoko Ono for the first time.
The snag was that both were married. But, you know, it was the 1960s. The affair soon turned them into one of the most infamous couples the music world has ever known as Lennon declared, “When I fell in love with Yoko, I knew, my God, this is different than anything I’ve ever known,” adding, “This is more than a hit record, more than gold, more than everything”.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.