A lot of older people think, ‘Oh, everyone knows The Beatles; everyone knows John Lennon.’ And that’s simply not the case,” says Sean Ono Lennon. “I meet my niece and nephew’s friends, I talk to Gen Z kids, and some of them don’t know the difference between The Beatles and The Monkees, I swear.” The son of the late Beatles star and artist Yoko Ono might have a point. For anyone over a certain age, the Fab Four are an immutable part of the culture, as constant and familiar as the air we breathe. But who says it’s going to stay that way?
This was, in short, the core motivation behind Lennon’s new project, a lush new boxset of 123 remastered recordings by John and Yoko, during the period when their political activism was at its most daring. The release follows on from this year’s documentary film One to One: John & Yoko, which focused on the couple’s 1972 benefit concert for the children at New York’s Willowbrook school (who were victims of a massive abuse scandal) and their politically radical life in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s. The boxset contains extensive, cleaned-up recordings from the performance and others around that time, with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Frank Zappa, Stevie Wonder and Keith Moon among the collaborators.
