The John Lennon song Yoko Ono never revisits: “It’s just kind of chilling in a way”
Since John Lennon’s death in 1980, Yoko Ono has been the guardian of her late husband’s legacy. It’s impossible to understand the impact of Ono not only on Lennon’s solo work or their collaborative projects, but even on The Beatles too as the performance artist introduced the musicians to the world of experimental sound art. And while on a whole Ono can look back at Lennon’s legacy with deep love and pride, there is one song she can’t revisit.
There is a deeply boring subsect of musical fans who like to claim that Yoko Ono split up The Beatles or blame her for what they see as a decline in Lennon’s career. This misogynistic brigade can’t see the wood for the trees of their hatred, becoming ignorant to the fact that long before she even met the musician, the Japanese artist was already a prominent name working within the realm of music.
Long before Lennon and Ono started their own collaborations, Ono had done countless musical performances alongside her audio art peers like John Cage, being part of an experimental scene pushing the limits of sound and its relationship with art. It’s clear that Lennon was deeply inspired by this, influencing late Beatles tracks like ‘Revolution 9’ as well as his more experimental, left-field approach to his solo project. Lyrically, too, Lennon and Ono’s shared political passions coloured so much of the Beatles’ solo work and his powerful odes to class consciousness or protest cries for peace.
In love, life and their work, the married couple were, and still are, utterly inseparable from one another’s legacy. No doubt, with more time, they would have gone on to collaborate on plenty more art, but in 1980, Lennon was fatally shot, and their time was cut short.
After the assassination of the musician, the world was left in complete shock. However, in a song written by the Beatle during the year of his death, Ono discovered an ominous suggestion that perhaps her husband always had a feeling that he’d meet an untimely end.
“Living on borrowed time, without a thought for tomorrow,” Lennon sang on ‘Borrowed Time’, a track written on a sailing trip to Bermuda in June 1980. The lyrics deal with an ongoing sense of “confusion and deep despair” that coloured his youth. Whether that be about his difficult childhood back in Liverpool or the overwhelming and likely somewhat terrifying years spent at the centre of Beatlemania, Lennon speaks about his younger years being lived in a state of dread, with an odd inkling that something bad would happen as he lived on “borrowed time”.
This alone would be enough to make the song too difficult for his widow to hear. There are countless instances were artists that tragically predicted their own deaths in prophetic pieces of art, and to Ono, this song likely feels like Lennon’s own.
But what makes the song even more devastating, now knowing that Lennon’s life would be taken from him only months later, is the message of hope it closes on. “Now I am older. The future is brighter and now is the hour,” he sang, suggesting that now with age, he was able to understand the world and see life with a more positive outlook, excited to more forward and see where it would take him.
“Now when we think about the title, it’s just kind of chilling in a way, that he was very aware that it was a borrowed time,” Ono said to Uncut in 1998, claiming that while she looks back on Lennon’s legacy with enduring love, this song is just too hard to hear.
