Did Yoko Ono save the Beatles?

Telegraph

27-03-2025

Did Yoko Ono hold the Beatles together in their final, fertile years? The award-winning American journalist David Sheff floats this notion in Yoko, his warm and absorbing biography of the woman who for so long bore most of the blame for the breakup of the world's favourite band. Pointing out John Lennon's depression and lack of purpose before his all-consuming affair with Ono, Sheff posits that by accompanying him to studio sessions – 'literally holding his hand sometimes' – she helped to maintain his engagement with the Beatles when he already 'had a foot out the door'. 'There's a version of the Beatles story,' Sheff suggests, 'in which there would be no Let It Be or Abbey Road without Yoko.' Now there's a thought.
Like many Beatles fans, I've often wondered what this mysterious figure in black was actually doing, sitting next to Lennon for weeks on end, staring blankly as the Beatles composed some of the greatest music any of us have ever heard. A lot of resentment, misogyny and racism has been thrown at her inscrutable presence, as captured in Michael Lindsay Hogg's 1970 documentary Let It Be, and Peter Jackson's more recent six-hour reconstruction Get Back. Yet Ono's explanation, given to Paul Zollo in 1992, was disarming: 'I was just living my own world inside. Dream world. I was sitting there just thinking about all the stuff I'm doing in my head. So I was there and in a way I wasn't there.'
As Sheff's sympathetic biography illustrates, Ono had been sitting and dreaming her whole life, then turning those dreams into audacious conceptual art. As a 12-year-old in Japan in the wake of the Second World War, impoverished and starving, she developed mental tricks to survive. One was to create imaginary feasts for her younger brother, Kei, when he was weeping with hunger, saying: 'Eat this imaginary apple. It will fill you up.' 'It did fill her up,' Kei told Sheff. 'She was good at imagining. But those words didn't fill me up!'
The exhortation to 'imagine' became a central theme of Ono's art, running through Grapefruit, her 1964 book of 'instruction works', full of pieces such as 'Imagine the clouds dripping, dig a hole in the garden to put them in.' She gave Lennon a copy after their first brief encounter in 1966, at her debut London exhibition. He kept it by his bedside for two years before they became romantically involved (and married in 1969). 'I used to read it, and sometimes I'd get very annoyed by it,' he told Rolling Stone in 1971. 'Then sometimes I'd be very enlightened by it. I went through all the changes that people go through with her work.' In many ways, Sheff's book serves as a guide to those very changes of perception.
In 1971, Ono sat next to Lennon, by now her third husband, at a piano in their mansion in Tittenhurst Park in Berkshire, contributing lyrical ideas while he composed a ballad based around her work. 'I wasn't man enough to let her have credit for it,' Lennon remorsefully admitted to Sheff in a 1980 interview, shortly before his death. At a ceremony in 2017, as Lennon had in his final months urged, the American National Music Publishers Association recognised Ono as co-writer of that ballad: Imagine.
Although this biography is unauthorised, Sheff admits to a little bias. As a 24-year-old journalist, he spent weeks interviewing Lennon and Ono for Playboy magazine around the recording of Double Fantasy (1980), and established a lifetime friendship with Ono and son Sean Lennon in the aftermath of John's murder. In 2008, Sheff published a memoir, Beautiful Boy, about his own son's struggles with drug addiction and the friends who helped save his life. 'Those friends,' he reveals, 'were Yoko and Sean.' Don't open these pages expecting a hatchet job.
Nor is Yoko a hagiography, though. Ono is too complex a person for that. Sheff doesn't shy away from her capacity for protective selfishness, incredible self-indulgence, mind-boggling superstitiousness – consulting tarot readers, numerologists and psychics – and the seemingly magical thinking with which she ran a business empire that nonetheless became wildly successful. (Ono's net worth was valued at $500 million [£390 million] in 2024.) 'I saw her at her worst,' writes Sheff, 'at her most paranoid, scared and despondent, but also at her best, when she was elated, creative and inspired, exhibiting the kind of otherworldly wisdom John described.'
Born in 1933, Ono was raised in one of the richest banking families in Japan. She was a privileged misfit, growing up in a near-total absence of parental love or support for her independence as a woman. She experienced the horrors of war firsthand, watching Tokyo burn on March 9 1945, when the Americans dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on the capital. In the aftermath, she rebelled against parental pressure to make a socially acceptable marriage, and fled to New York to study art. Her first husband was the experimental piano player Toshi Ichiyanagi, who would go on to become a leading Japanese composer. Ono's parents cut off all financial support; she worked as a secretary and translator to sustain her artistic career.
Ono's first public performance was over 60 years ago, but she has only in the last couple of decades been acknowledged as a pioneering feminist artist; large retrospectives have recently been staged at London's Tate Modern and New York's Museum of Modern Art. But Sheff's concise account, barely 300 pages long, shows that her accomplishments were rarely doubted by her peers. She was a vital mover and shaker in a small but influential 1950s New York performance art scene that included the likes of composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Classically trained as both a pianist and vocalist, Ono's work included avant-garde musical pieces, one of which she performed with the great jazz virtuoso Ornette Coleman at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1968.
The 'ballad of John and Yoko', as Sheff calls it, has been covered in thousands of books, articles and documentaries, but it's enlightening to rewatch familiar stories from Ono's perspective. We learn what she was up to, for instance, during the famous 'lost weekend', when the couple split for 18 months while Lennon caroused in Los Angeles with May Pang, the girlfriend Ono chose for him. Ono, Sheff explains, had kicked him out on account of his cheating, heavy drinking and lack of productivity; she hoped to preserve her own sense of self. During the separation, she socialised, read voraciously, made art and recorded an album; Lennon phoned on a near-daily basis, begging her to take him back. Friends from Elton John to Paul McCartney lobbied her on Lennon's behalf. Eventually she capitulated, but only if he made changes to his alcohol consumption. Lennon called Pang, told her 'Yoko's allowed me to come home', and dropped her on the spot. What followed genuinely seems to have been the happiest five years of Lennon and Ono's lives.
Lennon's murder on December 8 1980 rocks this book like a bomb. If it remains a huge event in most music-lovers' lives, its impact on Ono was all-consuming. The grief and horror of those chapters is shattering to read: the rest of Sheff's book is a kind of journey through a very public post-traumatic stress disorder. He gives a first-hand insight into the gentle relationship she had with interior designer Sam Havadtoy from 1981 to around 2000, and the intense bond she has formed with her son, Sean; but it all feels like aftermath and reverberation – a life lived in dust that refuses to settle.
The public perception of Ono's character and career, at least, experienced an almost complete reversal in that period. Today, her status as a significant artist isn't in doubt. Even the wildest music she made, the stuff that was once deemed unlistenable, has gained 'cult classic' status: it and she have been acknowledged as inspirations by everyone from Patti Smith and Siouxsie Sioux to Sonic Youth and Lady Gaga. No one can call themselves a Beatles completist if they aren't proud owners of the 1970 album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band – a companion piece to Lennon's album of the same name – on which John and Ringo rock their punky socks off and Ono ululates with terrifying, joyous majesty. Dance remixes of her work have given her 13 number one hits on the Billboard dance charts in America.
Ono is 92 now. She lives in seclusion on a farm in upstate New York, set in 600 acres of fields and forests; she's regularly visited by her children, Sean and Kyoko (the latter from her second marriage, to Tony Cox, in the 1960s), and her several grandchildren. I met her in 1988, and I was utterly charmed. She had a beautiful laugh, which tinkled with lightness and amusement throughout our conversation, and it was suddenly so easy to perceive the vividly intelligent, arty woman with whom Lennon had fallen in love. She didn't wear her usual dark sunglasses, and tears glistened in her eyes when she spoke about John. But even in the long grief of her widowhood, she exuded an open-hearted love for the world.
I asked this remarkable woman – who has appeared naked on album covers, howled from inside black bags on stage and released recordings of her own miscarriage – whether there was anything she looked back on with embarrassment. 'I'm too emotional to think of it objectively,' she replied. 'But there are periods when we [were] not exactly slim!' She laughed. 'You know, some things like that, now I go, 'I don't wanna see that!' A series of embarrassments. But that's just me.'