The only two musicians John Lennon wanted to work with: “That ain’t bad picking”
For all the flowers John Lennon gets for being the artiste of The Beatles, the man was a stalwart collaborator. It’s not that he shouldn’t get credit for conceptualising ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and writing the likes of ‘In My Life’ and ‘Mother’, far from it, but his talent went further than just what he could come up with himself. This was a guy who, whenever someone new entered his life, wanted to see what he could make with them.
Lennon flirted with forming a band with Eric Clapton on more than a few occasions. He successfully put together the one-off group The Dirty Mac with Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell for a fairly turgid performance on The Rolling Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus. After The Beatles collapsed in 1970, he contacted Clapton again with the idea of forming a supergroup with the two of them, Nicky Hopkins and, bizarrely, Phil Spector.
He outlined his vision for the group in a letter auctioned in December 2024, promising to “bring the balls back to rock ‘n’ roll.” Proof, if there was ever needed, that discourse surrounding the death of rock really has never changed. He was also a vocal supporter of Billy Preston joining The Beatles full-time. It wasn’t a bad idea either. As the Get Back documentary showed, the keyboard virtuoso’s time sitting in for the sessions that would later become Let It Be was so joyous it stopped the Fabs all wanting to kill and eat each other.
However, the size of Lennon’s impact on music was nothing compared to the man’s ego. By 1980, he’d grown enough to admit that his younger self would specifically frame himself as the artist over his other collaborators. In an interview with the BBC that year, he said the song ‘Imagine’ “should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song. A lot of it—the lyric and the concept—came from Yoko, but in those days, I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted her contribution.”
The irony is that in that interview, he names his wife as one of the two musicians he’d ever collaborate with properly. To the point that working with Elton John on his 1974 ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’ and David Bowie on ‘Fame’, one of the best singles of the decade, would be dismissed as “one-night stands”. He said this in the legendary Rolling Stone interview he conducted three days before his death where he also revealed the only other musician he actively chose to work with.
“Throughout my career, I’ve selected to work with… only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. That ain’t bad picking.” It is a heart-warming admission from a time period that was otherwise characterised by the kind of bitterness and waspishness that makes Kendrick and Drake look like handbags at dawn. However, Lennon had only grown so much, sniping at Macca again by saying that “it’s easier to say what my contribution was to him than what he gave to me. And he’d say the same.”
After all, Lennon was nothing if not a bundle of contradictions. He was at his best as a collaborator yet was desperate to be recognised as the lone genius. Who knows how much more he could have grown if he’d been given more time?
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