John Lennon, the artist formerly known as Dr Winston O’Boogie, was born 78 years ago on 9th October and to mark both this and the release of Imagine: The Ultimate Collection (an extended version of his second post-Beatles album in 1971), Yoko Ono created a “global listening event”.
It was done in partnership with Spotify and was open to both premium and free users. There was a countdown timer on a Universal-owned site and it opened at 11am PT/2pm ET/7pm GMT. sandbox logged in as soon as it launched (having to agree to grant Universal Music access to our Spotify account data in order to do so) and joined in with a cheery “HELLO!” but was soon pushed to the side when Yoko Ono suddenly pitched up (her comments marked in blue) and posted a scan of the typewritten lyrics to ‘Imagine’ from March 1971 and photos of her with Lennon in New York in the 1970s.
It threatened to catch fire when Elliot Mintz, Klaus Voormann, Rob Stevens, Paul Hicks, Nic Knowland and Tristan de Lancy (also in blue) showed up to answer questions – all key names in the album’s original creation and new expanded version. We’re not sure how much the answers (“I think it puts the listener as close to John Lennon as they’ve ever experienced if they’ve never been able to see him perform live”; “Well Baby this all started off as a jam – just having fun in February at Ascot”) really added in terms of getting a fresh insight into the album’s creation.
It all seemed to move incredibly slowly, like being caught in a WhatsApp group with too many people talking at cross-purpose. That may in part be down to the design of the comments box that really didn’t lend itself to tightly flowing conversations in real time. Of course it was a great thing for Lennon fans to have Ono and the others there replying to questions, but the slow, vague or platitudinous answers seemed to suck any natural rhythm out of it. That said, having the posting of photos and lyrics from the time was a nice touch and is precisely the kind of stuff hardcore fans want to see. All in all, a mixed bag-ism.
