Source: Lennon on Lennon - 2017

CONVERSATION

Tariq Ali & Robin Blackburn | January 21, 1971, Tittenhurst Park (Lennon’s home), Berkshire, UK | Excerpts published March 8, 1971, the Red Mole (UK)

In late September 1970—about four months after the release of Let It Be, the chart-topping final Beatles album—Lennon began recording John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, which would become a Top Ten hit. Coproduced by Phil Spector, the record contains highly personal songs about pain, childhood, love, and religion, as well as the political “Working Class Hero.” In “God,” the often-quoted opening track, he sings, “I was the walrus, but now I’m John / And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on / The dream is over.” The song also lists all the things Lennon doesn’t believe in, ending with “I don’t believe in Beatles / I just believe in me, Yoko and me, that’s reality.”

Lennon finished making the album in late October and, three months later, he and Ono met at their Georgian country home with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, a pair of British writers and political activists. A highly condensed version of their discussion appeared shortly thereafter in the Red Mole, a left-wing newspaper edited by Ali. What follows is the much longer original interview, which has not previously appeared in print.

As you’ll see, the conversation covers everything from childhood trauma to the Beatles’ music and breakup but focuses mostly on politics. Lennon talks much more candidly about revolutionary, socialist, and even communist ideologies than he does in better-known interviews.

The singer found the discussion energizing, wrote Ali in England’s Guardian newspaper thirty years later. “The day after the interview he rang me,” Ali recalled, “and said he had enjoyed it so much that he’d written a song for the movement, which he then proceeded to sing down the line: ‘Power to the People.’”

The conversation has already begun when the tape begins rolling. At that point, Lennon is commenting on what he is trying to accomplish with his music. —Ed.

John Lennon: I’m expressing my own feelings, but then the job of that record [John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band], really, is to incite in other people’s minds: “Is this about me as well? Does this apply to me?” To put that question mark there—that it’s not as simple as God or myth will save you. We have to question ourselves about what our position really is, and don’t be too comfortable about just being long-haired, you know.

Solutions I don’t know. I don’t think you give solutions. I think if anybody has solutions to give, it tends to put people in a position of either having to accept it or reject it. And that splits people into Marxists or Trotskyists or Socialists and all that, which is a problem in a way. But of course, according to dialectic materialism and those ideas, that is a natural thing that will always go on.

The thing that all those people and us and the hippies are formally against is status quo conservatism, which is unreal; it cannot be. And so our problem is really to solidify, but how do you solidify under a natural dialectic materialism—splitting and breaking and forming and reforming counterrevolution? I don’t know how to come to terms with it. I don’t know what the answer to that is. Obviously Mao is aware of that and keeps the ball moving.

Robin Blackburn: You mean in the Cultural Revolution?

Lennon: Yeah. He’s obviously going by the letter. Like Russia. You were saying, “What happened to Russia?” It’s obvious that it [a bureaucracy] will happen anywhere. Even in Cuba it’ll probably happen. Anywhere, once the new power’s taken over, they have to try to establish the status quo just to keep the trains running or to keep people running a factory. And then you’re in that position.

Blackburn: Ah, but to keep the trains running, do you have to have repressive apparatus like Stalin? Perhaps they’d run just as well with workers’ democracy.

Lennon: Yeah, I think that, but I still think that we all have bourgeois in us, and we all get tired now and then, and we all—maybe especially after a revolution—would tend to relax a little. And the amount of fervent revolutionaries after the revolution probably died off a little.

Tariq Ali: In Russia they did, but they died literally.

Lennon: Yeah, but how do you keep people in an activist role once they’ve achieved what seems to be the aim, which is to take over? How do we or any of us prevent people and ourselves from becoming apathetic again or relaxing without having somebody like Mao, which is something different, which continually doesn’t allow that to happen? What happens when Mao goes?

Blackburn: Having Mao is an accidental and partial solution. I mean, it’d be better to have something built in.

Lennon: Yeah, well, I think he’s trying to build in Maoism but it’s almost the same as building in Confucianism or—

Ali: It’s got to come from the masses. That’s the crucial thing.

Lennon: Yeah, if Mao personally has to keep doing that, that means when he dies, unless he’s really infiltrated all their minds completely, they will go the same way as any other, because people are people. And obviously, as all the Communists always said, you have to keep the revolution going continually or keep purging. That’s the difficulty, you know. I mean, if we took over in Britain, then we’d have the job of cleaning up the bourgeois and we’d have the job of keeping people in a revolutionary state of mind.

Ali: Yeah, but one difference between Britain now and revolutionary Russia is that despite the fact that it is bourgeois education, the cultural and educational level of a large majority of the British people today as a whole is much, much higher than it was with the peasants in Russia and China, with the ignorance and backwardness and rural . . .

Lennon: But even though relatively it’s the same apart from [the English having] some kind of knowledge of what happened in 1812 or Columbus went to America, relative human feelings are the same. And it’s about eating and sleeping and fucking, and “Do I have a roof over my head?” And opportunism . . . well, what would be the solution to that?

Yoko Ono: The young generation take over—

Lennon: Yeah, but they’re no different from anybody else—

Blackburn: People are what they are because of the institutions that have formed them. I mean, institutions like the family, informal ones, as much as [political] parties or anything.

Lennon: Yeah.

Blackburn: The basic thing that happened in Russia is the old order collapsed under the strain of the First World War. And the revolutionaries were a tiny group. They were thirty thousand people in a country of maybe two hundred million. You say, “Take over.” What would happen in this country is the masses, the great majority of the working people of this country, would have to take over. And if you’ve got a great mass movement like that—and we’d have to have, because this social [system] is not going to crumble—

Lennon: Not go without a fight, yeah.

Blackburn: That seems to me . . . that it’s in the struggle you can develop the institutions which can check arbitrariness, which can check opportunism. And that’s why in China, where they had twenty years of struggle, they’ve been able to check opportunism and arbitrariness much more than in Russia where it was just a few months.

Lennon: But it was instigated by Mao himself, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like a national feeling of, well, there’s too many opportunists and too much apathetic . . .

Ali: No, but—

Lennon: [Hears someone at door.] Hello? Who is it?

Voice: Laundry.

Lennon: Laundry, OK. Stick it here.

Ali: The point you raise is not one of Mao on his own. It’s basically one of revolutionary leadership, of a revolutionary organization, which has a leadership, which is precisely capable of taking the masses forward when they reach a certain level of consciousness.

Blackburn: But you have to have some followers. He’s [Mao’s] just one man. If the youth of China hadn’t been behind him, the Cultural Revolution would have been impossible. And let’s face it, the Cultural Revolution didn’t succeed completely.

Lennon: The thing is . . . obviously, they are fairly well behind him ’cause they all got their [Little Red] Book [Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung], and they’re shouting. . . . If the youth in Britain were suddenly given free rein to destroy the local councils and the local schools, it wouldn’t take too much [to get them going]. But I wonder about the charges against Mao. The personality cult doesn’t seem to be part of the basic Communist idea.

Ali: It isn’t.

Lennon: Khrushchev, in his book, [Khrushchev] Remembers—I know he’s a bit of a lad and all that—but he sort of puts him [Mao] down for that, saying it’s like Stalinism. I’d like to know your opinion on that.

Ali: In the first place, I think that a personality cult like the one which has been built up in China is alien to Marxism.

Lennon: Yeah.

Ali: You know, because Marxism is basically about ideas. It is also, of course, about people, but Marx and Lenin and Trotsky and these revolutionaries and even, in the beginning of China, Mao himself, were totally opposed to the personality cult, which is why it’s written into the Chinese constitution.

Lennon: So how do they account for it?

Ali: I think it’s the fact that one section of the Chinese leadership found in Mao’s cult the best guarantee of ousting a right-wing section of the Chinese leadership, a revisionist Chinese leadership, and this has literally got out of control from them, and they find it a bit difficult to withdraw—

Blackburn: It’s a weakness of the movement that Mao needed to use this cult.

Lennon: It seems like people need a father figure, someone to lead them.

Blackburn: Even in Russia . . . Lenin hated anyone praising him in public.

Lennon: Well, he didn’t like them to say it in public, but he liked them to sort of acknowledge what he did.

Blackburn: Lenin or Stalin?

Lennon: Stalin.

Blackburn: Lenin really was a very modest man. On the other hand, it’s true that people seem to need [a father figure], but it’s partly when they haven’t created an institution of their own, they need a substitute. And partly because the revolutionary institutions were weak in Russia, they needed the little father—Lenin.

Lennon: Yeah, but I think we all do.

Ono: That’s the problem.

Blackburn: The day we control our own lives, we don’t.

Lennon: Yeah. But to create a more illusionary—that gets like religion—father figure of the state or the image of the workers is superior to individualism, isn’t it? I think with Western-style communism in power, it would be possible to create an almost imaginary workers’ image of themselves as the father figure.

Blackburn: So long as their life in the factory is being run by somebody else—by capitalists or even a bureaucrat—they’ll need a father figure. But if they’re running their own life, which is most of the time in the country, I think you’re right: they’d still need some ideals. But I don’t think it would take the form of a personality.

Lennon: It happened in Russia and China and Cuba. I mean, Fidel and Che and all that. It seems that we all have this basic need for it, you know.

Ono: But people have to have more trust in themselves.

Ali: That’s the question. You see, what one’s got to very consciously do is instill into the working-class movement a feeling of self-confidence, and you can’t only instill that by propaganda.

Lennon: No, no.

Ali: It’s when the workers begin to move themselves. They occupy a factory. When the capitalists make them redundant, they say, “OK, you can bugger off, we’ll run this factory ourselves.” And when they actually start running the factory themselves, as happened in France in May of ’68, then they begin to feel a sense of their own strength.

Ono: The fact is that you have to give people some responsible position. And all the governments are afraid of that, even Mao. They like to make a revolution, but then after that they get afraid of the people and they try to limit their abilities.

Ali: That’s true.

Blackburn: I lived in Cuba for a bit, Yoko, and . . . you see, they’ve got the Americans just ninety miles away. They’re partly wrong and partly right, but they think it’s too big a risk [to give the people too much power]. They let the people have a certain amount of responsibility, but until you let them have complete responsibility it’s not really a revolution, is it?

Lennon: Yeah.

Ono: You don’t trust people.

Ali: That’s right. It shows on the part of the leadership a lack of self-confidence that you can’t trust the people. And you see, the big difference between Mao and Stalin is this: that Stalin was a counterrevolutionary. He strangled the Russian revolution—literally strangled it, killed all the old Bolsheviks. Mao made a revolution. That’s the big difference between them.

And then Mao did what Stalin in his wildest nightmares used to dread. Mao actually mobilized the people themselves. And when he mobilized them, the young Chinese students and workers were out into the streets. Then in many places, like Shanghai and Canton, there were many groups of workers and students who said, “Well, we hate Liu Shaoqi [Chinese revolutionary who was president of the People’s Republic of China from 1959 to 1968 under Mao]. But we also think that Mao has made certain mistakes.” And it created a fantastic regeneration of things. And this is, in a sense, why some of the people around Mao got scared, because they said if they develop—

Lennon: Loopholes.

Ali: It’s a possibility, yeah.

Blackburn: [Inaudible.] Everybody wrote their own posters.

Ono: Why do you need Mao’s poster all over? They’re forcing Mao to take a position of a dictatorship.

Ali: I must confess, I was in Peking [now Beijing] last summer, going on my way to North Korea, and it was a bit religious, this whole bit of seeing small kids passing by and the teacher would instruct them to bow for Mao. I disagree—

Lennon: Because there’s bound to be a reaction against that.

Ali: Either that or the kids won’t take it seriously. Like learning what they learn in school. It just becomes a part of a sort of convention, which they get over.

Blackburn: But even the counterrevolutionaries or revisionists or whatever you want to call them in China used Mao. Everybody was using Mao.

Can I ask you something which sort of is related to this but concerns your position as a pop music artist? There has been this fantastic colonial revolution where the peasants of the third world have started throwing off the domination of their countries. They haven’t created a perfect socialism—and they couldn’t because they didn’t have any resources—but they’ve done pretty well to defeat the largest imperialist powers in the world, like in Vietnam. Now when we’re talking about relating to that, your music, it’s very interesting . . . they thought that was imperialist music.

Lennon: Yeah.

Blackburn: ’Cause it came out of Voice of America.

Lennon: Yeah. Also the Russians had put it out that we were capitalist robots—which we were, I suppose. [Laughs.]

Blackburn: But they were pretty stupid, too, not to see that there was something—

Lennon: They’re scared of the Western culture. Just recently I read something where some Vietnamese up north had had a secret club where they all dreamt about what they would do if they were capitalists with all the women and they were playing rock ’n’ roll. And the actual musicians were playing; they were not playing records. And they were imprisoned for twenty years ’cause of it. I think they’re so scared of Coca-Cola and rock ’n’ roll—

Ali: You’re right, you see, because I’ll tell you—

Lennon: But I think that’s silly.

Blackburn: But they’ve got to see the difference, haven’t they? In Cuba it was a really big breakthrough in 1967—it was actually when Sgt. Pepper came out. They listened to it and said, “This is not bourgeois,” and they started playing it on the radio.

Lennon: Amazing.

Blackburn: And of course the Vietnamese also really understand that. But then you get these ridiculous incidents like the one you mentioned, which is very bad.

Lennon: It’s the same kind of paranoia that the West has about anything Communist.

Blackburn: But I think that your own development is probably gonna help this, too. Because, as you say, I think they were mainly wrong but they were also partly right to say that the Fab Four were part of the system. As you become less part of the system, then I think they can understand. Of course, the cultural barrier is also very big.

Lennon: But there is the problem, as I’ve become more radical, with Two Virgins or whatever, putting heavy statements out, [that] the influence grows more strong and solid but it diminishes. The Beatles’ influence is far superior to any of us individually working. And that is part of my policy, really—to shake off teenyboppers so they won’t frighten off the other type of people. We try and get through to them. So the power diminishes then.

Blackburn: But as you say, it’s also concentrated more.

Lennon: Yeah, yeah.

Ono: Let’s face it: Beatles music was a twentieth century folk song within the frame of capitalism. They couldn’t do it otherwise. And to make their names big, they had to play the game, smiling and all that. And if the whole society will change, their song will change, too.

Lennon: Well, we did turn out to be a Trojan horse in a way. We were moved right into the center, and then we said, “Oh, fuck, drugs, and the rest of it.” And that’s when they started dropping us.

Blackburn: I think you were only a Trojan horse because you were that right from the beginning, actually. There was always that contradiction.

Lennon: Yes, yes.

Ono: He was always like that.

Blackburn: You did come out of Liverpool slums in a way.

Lennon: Well, the first thing we had to do was proclaim our Liverpool-ness to the world and say, “It’s all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this. Because anybody [from] Liverpool that had made it—like the comedians Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, and Arthur Askey—all had to lose their accents to get on the BBC. I mean, these are only comedians, but that’s what came out of Liverpool before us. We stopped the accent game, and all the middle classes were trying to talk Liverpool. That’s a fact, you know.

Like [Manfred Mann vocalist] Mike d’Abo was on the other night saying that he always felt embarrassed about his middle-classness and his voice. And for a period he would say [affects strong Liverpool accent] “’ow are you?” “all right,” and all that. All those people would do that. And the people at Harrow and Eton now are all growing long hair and trying to lose their accents, which is a good change.

Blackburn: Did anybody ever try to get you to stop using Liverpool accents?

Lennon: No, no.

Ali: They wouldn’t.

Lennon: We always put it on more.

Ono: So the Trojan horse thing seems to be very successful—

Lennon: But we weren’t much aware of it.

Ono: No, but I mean for the future. Like [Yippie leader Jerry] Rubin . . . I like what he did on TV and everything. But he tried to on David Frost smoke marijuana or something. That was very good, but it won’t work . . . if you just take a marijuana cigarette and you just smoke it . . .

Lennon: Rubin’s position is that there’s no time for subtlety anymore.

Ali: It’s an absurd position, actually, because—

Lennon: I think it helps—

Blackburn: It shakes things up, Tariq. That’s the point. People need shaking up.

Lennon: It was the best thing that happened on TV. He took [black-power activist] Michael X on Simon Dee’s [show on British television], sneaked him in.

Blackburn: But somehow we’re all part of a discussion or being interviewed, and it’s not breaking the framework. So even though it could have been better done and all that, at least breaking the framework once was a good thing to do.

Lennon: I thought it was good to sort of incite people to do similar things, you know. Be disobedient in school or whatever it is.

Ono: Stick your tongue out.

Lennon: Stick your tongue out, whatever—just keep insulting ’em.

Blackburn: The schools is where it could start happening, actually, ’cause—

Lennon: Yeah, that’s where Red Mole should get out—in the schools.

Ali: We are getting a lot there.

Lennon: Especially to the students.

Ali: Yeah, lots of school students now are reading the Mole.

Lennon: That’s good.

Blackburn: Do you get a different pattern of correspondence these days?

Lennon: [To Ono.] It has changed over time, hasn’t it?

Ono: Very different now.

Lennon: Seems more intelligent letters than “give my love to Paul,” and all that, which used to be.

Ono: Very political these days.

Lennon: Yeah, it’s usually, “Will you help this way or write a letter this way?” Et cetera, et cetera. So it’s becoming more realistic, the mail.

Ali: John, what were the basic reasons why you split up with the other Beatles?

Lennon: With the others? Well, because, uh, Paul is a conservative . . .

Blackburn: He votes Tory, does he?

Lennon: Well, I don’t think any of us have ever voted. But he is a conservative and always was, in a way. He’s more interested in putting out pop music than anything that says anything. And it was just that kind of thing. At one period, I just said to them, “Well, I think it’s limiting what we’re doing together, and I want to work individually and not with the group anymore; the group image inhibits me.” And it was just like that, you know? It was just a case of we got to a point where we just couldn’t work musically together, because I couldn’t be bothered with jog-along happy songs about nothing in particular. I just could no longer feel it.

Blackburn: Funny enough, some of the new record [John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band] seems almost to be taking a new look at a lot of things that were there in some of the Beatles stuff, in a different way. I was just thinking, for example, that a lot of the old songs used to be about childhood.

Lennon: Yeah.

Blackburn: Now you’re talking about your real childhood.

Lennon: Well, I was always inclined to write about childhood. Most of the childhood stuff would be from me.

Blackburn: Yeah. I mean, it’s good stuff, but it had a missing element.

Lennon: Well, the missing element was reality—the fact that I wasn’t wanted and that my worst fears had come true in a way. That fear of not being wanted. And when that finally hit home, well, it cleared the air.

Blackburn: Maybe that’s why you had to sing about childhood in the previous times.

Lennon: Yeah, because I couldn’t face up to what was happening to me now, so I’d sing about childhood. But I just always found that when I was writing, I would always drift back into childhood. It would come out whether I liked it or not. I mean, it’s just a fact that that’s what makes you what you are, childhood. There’s no getting away from it.

Blackburn: Can I ask about a contradiction that comes up out of the new record? The bad things seem to come out of childhood and the family, but the good things also can come out of personal relationships.

Lennon: Well, with Yoko, you mean?

Blackburn: Well, quite. Which is really a new family.

Lennon: Yeah, I’m not against family as such.

Ono: It depends on how aware you are.

Lennon: Yeah, if you’re aware of what’s happening, well, you can manage. I suppose you could call Communists a family, too. But we just happen to be a family of two. And we found ourselves in the same position with her coming from middle-class Japan and me coming from working-class Liverpool. We found out we have the same experiences really.

Blackburn: That is amazing, isn’t it? The cultural and national—

Lennon: Yeah.

Ono: That means that the world is getting smaller and smaller, you know, and we just have to face that. John was saying he thought that he was singing American songs . . . but, I mean, there’s Coca-Cola in Britain, too, and we share a strange same culture in a way wherever you go.

Ali: After you and Yoko started living together, did you get a lot of letters from racists and people like that?

Lennon: Oh, yeah, we did. I was going to publish them at one time, but it never happened. I got ’em all together. All things like what the Japs did to us in the war.

Ono: And “She’ll slit your throat in the middle of the night.”

Lennon: I did this sort of declaration of our living together, the show at Robert Fraser’s [art gallery in London], which is You Are Here. People walked in, and when they got downstairs, it just said, “You are here.”

Ono: That’s a reality thing.

Lennon: Flashes of reality were always there. And then I let balloons go, with [a message attached that said,] “Write back to this address.” And of course it was all in the press, and a lot of letters came by the press.

And there was a lot of racialism. I was really shocked. Because I hadn’t thought about it; it hadn’t entered me mind, really. And it was a real shock. All from army people, people in Aldershot [an English town known as Home of the British Army] and these crazy old women and . . . “Jap bastards” and “They’ll slit our throats” and “Watch she doesn’t murder you at night.” I was really, really shocked by it. But that brought us closer together, of course.

The subtle difference between racism and antifemale-ism . . . It’s just so subtle, you have to really have a light shone on it to realize that—

Ali: You mean there’s a lot of male chauvinism?

Lennon: Oh, sure, sure. That’s what I was going to ask you: How do you treat your women? Because we can’t really have a revolution until we include women.

Ali: Absolutely.

Lennon: They have to be included. And it’s so subtle, the way you’re taught. It took me quite a time to realize my maleness cutting off certain areas for her. And she’s a red-hot liberationist. [Ono laughs.] And she was quick to show me where I was going wrong. There was just a built-in sort of reaction. And anybody that claims radicalism, I always just like to see how they treat the women.

Blackburn: Often, pretty badly.

Lennon: Yeah. I mean, it’s ridiculous. You can’t talk about equal rights and revolution and power to the people . . . the people include both sexes.

Ono: You see, from a woman’s point of view, I mean, you can’t love somebody unless you’re in an equal position at least. You know what I mean? If you’re suppressed and all that, everything that you do is out of fear or insecurity, and that’s not love. And that’s why, basically, I think women hate men.

Lennon: And vice versa.

Ono: So if you have slaves around in your house, how can you make a revolution then?

Ali: Absolutely. Actually, it is a problem which increasingly—I mean, a lot of it exists, but increasingly revolutionary men who are socialists or regard themselves as Marxists are having to come to terms with it because the women they live with, most of them happen to be political.

Blackburn: Not necessarily political but women’s liberation—

Lennon: Well, that’s political, all right.

Blackburn: My girlfriend’s in court today, actually, on the Miss World demonstration. [Women’s liberation activists protested at the 1970 Miss World event, as did people who charged that the contest judging evidenced racism. —Ed.]

Lennon: Oh, great.

Blackburn: I felt a bit guilty coming here. But when did you come to start thinking like that [about women’s rights]?

Lennon: Well, Yoko was into women’s liberation before I met her. She had to fight through a man’s world. The art crowd is just completely dominated by men. And they’re very bitchy, and she fought her way through that, so she was full of revolutionary zeal when we met. There was never any question about it that we had to have a fifty-fifty relationship or there was no relationship, and I was quick to learn. [Laughs.] It’s as simple as that.

Ono: Amazing, isn’t it?

Lennon: She did an article in Nova about two years back. She said, “Woman is the nigger of the world.” [Lennon is referring to an interview that Ono gave to the British magazine in 1969. She used the phrase in the Q&A, and the magazine quoted it on its cover. —Ed.] That was a couple of years back. And she was a friend of [feminist author] Kate Millet’s at one time.

Ono: Kate is a very nice girl. But she’s suffering, too, from that. Because if we try to be natural, then we naturally become lonely. Because there are so many women who are willing to be a slave, and usually men prefer that so you have to always take a chance of, “Am I going to lose my man?” It’s very sad.

Ali: In the last few issues of the Mole, we’ve been doing a lot of interviews with these women night cleaners, who go around cleaning offices—

Lennon: Oh, yeah.

Ali: —and how they’re trying to unionize themselves. And it’s an amazing story. In the latest issue, we’ve got a story about one of these bosses in these buildings, the people who pay out the money. He rang up May Hobbs [leader of the London’s Night Cleaners Campaign and author of the 1973 book Born to Struggle], who’s the leader of these women, and said that if she came around to his building and tried to unionize the women working there, he’d come and break her arm.

Lennon: Amazing. Insane.

Ono: So we’re very lucky, actually, because we have our own [inaudible] together.

Lennon: The more reality you come to face, the more alone you are, because you realize how much unreality is the main program of the day. And the more real we become, the more abuse we take. So it does radicalize us in a way, being put in a corner.

Blackburn: But it’s only by linking up with other people against the program of the day that one can really . . . I mean, one just feels better, I find. One can do it by oneself but with another person, that’s great, and more people, that’s even better.

Lennon: Quite true.

Ono: I really think that books and papers have power. Because there are many people who just read one book and got some kind of enlightened feeling . . . that changed their whole—

Blackburn: You think books and papers rather than—

Ono: Rather than guns. You know, because we always think, Well, we just have to go to war. We just have to do it that way.

Blackburn: That’s what the Weathermen are doing. Until you’ve actually built up some group—

Ono: A lot of revolutionaries think that. We’re soft to think that there’s a peaceful way, but communication’s a fantastic power—

Ali: But the crucial thing, surely, Yoko, is suppose you have established roots in the masses, through your propaganda, through your actions. Ultimately, when you challenge a bourgeois system and the capitalists come and try to crush you with force, then there are two options: either you lie down and are crushed or you fight back.

Ono: I know, yes, but before that, and it is before . . .

Blackburn: That’s what the Weathermen don’t understand. I think they’re just beginning to, actually, that one can’t get out on the streets—

Ali: —with a gun in hand and think that by even killing two policemen you suddenly radicalize the American working class.

Lennon: It goes the other way.

Ali: Exactly. At the moment it will.

Lennon: What about Ireland, then?

Ali: Ireland is an absolutely fascinating situation, because what has been happening in Ireland is the mistakes or the interests of British imperialism in the ’20s and ’30s . . . all those chickens are now coming home to roost. They thought they could have a partition, divide a country up on the basis of religion, on the basis of Protestants they had actually planted there a long time ago. And that this situation would continue to exist. And what’s happening now is that all these accumulated contradictions are blowing up in their face. No one would have dreamt ten years ago that the British would have to send the army back into Ireland again to keep the population under control. Their women and kids would be put up against the wall and searched. That’s what’s happening in Belfast and Derry today.

Lennon: It’s a good thing [Jerry] Rubin shouted about Ireland.

Ali: Oh, yes. Marx actually once said something very, very crucial in 1870, a hundred years ago now. He said that unless the British working class and the British revolutionary movement understands and supports the struggle of the Irish to free themselves—

Lennon: Yeah.

Ali: —they’ll never be able to free themselves. It’s absolutely true. They’ll never be free.

Lennon: Yeah. Sure. The southern Irish aren’t exactly—

Ali: No, the government isn’t—

Blackburn: Southern Ireland is as much a creation of that phony setup as the North. And the real revolutionaries in Ireland are just as much against the regime in the South as in the North. But I think the North is gonna be the weak link in the thing. Of course, there are big problems in the North, too. The working class is divided according to religion. The Protestant workers are still—

Lennon: Along with the fact that they don’t get a real vote or an equal vote.

Blackburn: They get unemployment, worse housing conditions . . .

Ali: They’re the poor whites of Great Britain in that sense. Like the poor whites are always in one sense much fiercer in their antiblack hatred than some of the poor whites in the South. Because the only privilege they had was the color of their skin. Otherwise they were as bad off as the blacks.

Ono: I get very excited when we talk about how there’s no choice but to use violence. In American TV I saw this program and a kid who just came back from Vietnam. He’s lying down in bed, and the only body he has is from here. [Apparently indicates no legs.] He’s just like a lump of meat. And he said, “Well, I think it was a good experience.”

Lennon: Because he doesn’t want to face it. He doesn’t want to think, Well, it was all a waste of time, and I’ve just got no legs. That’s the problem.

Ono: It’s such a painful thing. And when you think of violence, you just think of it conceptually. But what it actually means was maybe your kid or yourself would not have a hand or—

Blackburn: But, Yoko, think of this. Say in Northern Ireland, in those Catholic districts like Bogside, the police were coming in there and just shooting up the place. They killed seven people on one evening in August 1969. What they [the people] were doing was really defending themselves there. They were building the barricades. They weren’t symbolic at all. Those barricades were to stop the armored cars coming in. I think when you get defensive popular violence, that is 100 percent justified.

Lennon: Yeah, I do—

Blackburn: But if you go out with a gun and think you can individually pick off . . .

Ono: That’s why you do it before that happens—

Lennon: What do we do?

Ono: Well, that’s what I’m saying—

Ali: That’s the problem, because no social class, no ruling class in the whole of history, has ever given up power voluntarily.

Ono: I know, I know. But you see, I think tradition is created every day. And there was no tradition or precedent of that. But was there any precedent of an age where communication is so rapid and all that? No. And, for instance, when you publish the Red Mole, the leaders tend to be intellectual and they mainly appeal to intellectualism, college students . . . but if you start to have a column for younger kids who are not intellectualized yet, and appeal to their instincts and educate them in a Communist way . . .

Blackburn: [Inaudible] in the States is doing some of that.

Ono: And I think in that sense what Beatles do is fantastic. They didn’t use guns.

Lennon: Yeah, but as I said, nothing happened.

Ono: Right, right, but I mean there was a definite change. I’m not saying that it was for the better or anything. I’m just saying that sometimes you can make a revolution without using—

Lennon: But you can’t take power . . .

Ali: That’s the crucial thing.

Lennon: When it comes down to the nitty-gritty, they won’t let you have any power. They’ll give you all the right to perform and dance . . .

Ono: The thing is, even after revolution, if people don’t have any trust in themselves, then they’re gonna be slaves for the Communists or government or something. So it’s really very important to build people’s confidence, that you don’t need a father figure.

Blackburn: To do that, you need a focus for people to organize around, and sometimes the trade union does that. Sometimes a factory committee is something they can use.

Lennon: It’s a pity that a trade union couldn’t open up its own factories . . .

Blackburn: I mean, take Rolls-Royce. They haven’t said the workers can take over the factory and run it instead of closing it down, which they could. But in a way, I understand . . . that if you ran it in the capitalist system, you’d have to make a profit.

Lennon: But they could put the profit back into the factory, couldn’t they?

Blackburn: Yeah, but part of the way the system rules us is not just the profits . . . You’ve got to change the system so that men control the economy and not the market. ’Cause at the moment, the market says who is unemployed and who isn’t. It’s not any individual. Even the capitalists don’t decide to let the peasants starve and we live off the fat of the land. . . . It’s not Nixon who decides that. It’s the market. How are we going to stop exploiting the third world? Only by destroying the international market whereby we get the coffee and all the things that we [apparently indicates coffee cup] . . . This probably comes from the Philippines or somewhere.

Ono: Nixon does have a lot of control of the market. The thing is—and I know it sounds sort of very optimistic and all that—but if you make a fashion out of it, some kind of habit or idea spreads rapidly.

Ali: But look, Yoko, at the biggest fashion that has spread—the long hair, hippie fashion, and dropping out. Well, most of the people, in fact, large numbers of them that could afford to drop out, are middle-class kids. And the only reason they could afford to drop out was ’cause they could afford to drop in again.

Lennon: Yeah.

Ali: And they didn’t change. Some of the hippies I know who used to come with us on demonstrations to Grosvenor Square [in London] against the Americans in Vietnam and used to be beaten up with us by these thugs . . . I actually saw one of these people the other day in a big, big car going past a demonstration—it was, funny enough, a demonstration on Ireland—honking the horn of his car and churning abuse at the demonstrators as he drove off. And that’s just one incident, but it does typify—

Blackburn: How typical is it? I think hippies, some of them have very reactionary ideologies; quite a lot of them become quite radical, really. I don’t think they’re pure revolutionaries, but who of us is? The general cultural impact increased the size of the movement; it didn’t change the structure. This communication you talk about helps you build your movement. But in the end, the aim is not just to have a big movement; it’s actually to change society. The form the force will take is difficult to say.

In France in 1968, there were ten million workers on strike. I mean, there really was a big movement there, occupying the factories. It wasn’t machine guns in the streets; it was actually barricades and with the police going out with gas and the students fighting back with rocks. And they had these massive demonstrations, half a million workers in the center of Paris, and if they’d occupied the government buildings, which they could have done then, what would they [the government] have done? Sent the army in to shoot down workers? They might have, in which case you’d have to defend yourself. Probably the soldiers wouldn’t have fired on workers.

Lennon: The Communists thought that up, didn’t they? The Communist Party.

Blackburn: Absolutely. Because they didn’t want the revolution; they’re scared. They thought they could get it by a deal at the top because they don’t like the masses taking the initiative.

Lennon: Madness, isn’t it?

Ono: But you know, to talk about an extreme case, Nixon can’t be president if 90 percent of the people in United States would have a different idea about it. Then he would start to sing a different tune.

Lennon: But he has the money to communicate. Our position doesn’t.

Ono: Yes, but he relies on backers, and if the backers started to change—

Blackburn: But why should the backers change?

Lennon: If he changes, the backers no longer exist.

Ali: Someone else will take their place. That’s why you see some comrades say, “Let’s go and shoot off a few dozen capitalists.” You can do that, but it goes to their wives or their sons. Or otherwise the government buys it and sells it to someone else. It doesn’t change anything at all. That’s why even our propaganda—

[The tape is changed, causing a brief break in the conversation. —Ed.]

Lennon: It’s like blaming the failure of Christianity on Christ. It wasn’t Christ’s fault. It was the others. He was a basic Marxist with a halo on his head.

Ali: When we bring this interview around, there’s a very interesting text, which I think you should read, in fact, on the Russian Revolution by Trotsky called The Revolution Betrayed, in which he analyzes very concretely what went wrong.

Lennon: I get very muddled up about Trotskyists and this-ists and that-ists, what their position is.

Blackburn: Can I ask you . . . that war-is-over thing . . . did it link up? In Jerry Rubin’s book, he talks about a demonstration in New York called “The War Is Over.” Was that linked up to that [your campaign with the same name]?

Lennon: Not as far as we know.

Ono: It’s the first time I’ve heard of that.

Lennon: What we did was buy space in all the major cities in the West and just put up billboards saying that.

Blackburn: I think they must have done it at the same time.

Lennon: Maybe they saw the posters.

Blackburn: It’s curious because Rubin doesn’t say how he arrived at the idea or where they got it from. They had a demonstration in Central Park, and they rushed around, about two thousand of them, ran around Forty-Fourth Street, saying, “The war is over.”

Ono: When was that?

Blackburn: About a year ago.

Lennon: The original idea was to try and make fake paper headlines, like Daily Mirror, saying THE WAR IS OVER. And then, PRINCE PHILLIP IS GUILTY in small type.

Blackburn: The first thing he [Rubin] said is nobody asked who won. Nobody—even the people who were pro-war—felt they could say they were sorry about the war being over.

Lennon: In New York, the poster was on a giant billboard right next to the induction office for the army.

Ali: What factors would you say had, in fact, radicalized you over the last few years?

Lennon: I’d always been interested, as I said in the Rolling Stone article, in China and Russia as a working-class human being and always related to working class, although I was playing a capitalist game. I was not aware of that at the time. I was doing me job. But there was always this . . . I was an atheist as a teenager. And then with the advent of acid and that, there was all this glorious vision and all that shit. [Laughs.] And so I tended to go back because we all somehow need a father figure. Even Chairman Mao is that, and the father figures were all laid on the line with the Buddhists and the Christianity. And having been brought up in that, it was an easy switch to, well, you know there must be something to it. This feeling of brotherly love, I translated as a feeling of God.

But having gone through this [primal-scream] therapy and understood the wish for father and mother in life from us all—whether we have them or not, we never got what we wanted from them—and as soon as that was physically felt, there was no question of a God. I had to do it that way, though, to really kill off what the drugs had done. And it was that. And having felt my own pain, literally—I mean, in the therapy, you really feel every painful moment in your life, and it’s excruciating. It’s like being crucified. And you know that that’s your pain and not the result of somebody in the sky; it’s a result of your parents and your environment.

Blackburn: Your social context.

Lennon: Yeah. So it just all fell into place. At one time, I used to claim to be a Christian Communist, which is bullshit, really. But that was the position I took because I couldn’t disassociate myself with this God shit. But this therapy . . . there was a moment, experiencing some kind of pain and realizing it was to do with nobody else but me and the association with parents. But it was me that was feeling it. Nobody had anything to do with it; it was my own self. And that just finished it; it was the end of it. It wasn’t any great revelation. It was just, “Fuck it, what have I been doing?”

And then the thing was what to do about it. Having always, especially since Yoko came, wanted to do something about peace or people. And the point was what to do now. Where do I stand? What education have I got to catch up with? Or should I try and rely on my own common sense, which, now that the myths have gone, leads you to the one conclusion: hell, we’re all oppressed, and something has to be done about it.

Blackburn: And you actually were thinking about that even when writing songs like “Revolution [1]” that seem to be knocking politics? In a way, you were thinking about a political problem.

Lennon: Oh, sure. There’s two versions of the song “Revolution.” Of course, the underground left picked up on the one that says, “Count me out.” But the original version, which ended up on the LP, said, “When you talk about destruction, you can count me out in.” In and out—I put both in ’cause I wasn’t sure.

Blackburn: Yeah.

Lennon: On the one I released as a single, we did it in a more commercial style—the single is much faster than the album version—and I left out “count me in.” Because I’m a coward—I don’t want to be killed and all the rest of it. I didn’t really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few, and like, painting themselves green and standing in front of the police and getting picked off . . . I just thought it was unsubtle. I don’t think the original Communist revolutionaries went around shouting about it. They kept quiet.

Blackburn: They didn’t ask to be picked off.

Lennon: Right. They coordinated themselves a bit better. And I was really asking a question.

Blackburn: Also, they got dug in to what the people really wanted. Which is what Mao did. He didn’t just wave a red book.

Lennon: So the “Revolution [1]” song was that, really. I was posing a question and saying “in and out.” There was three “Revolutions”—two songs and one abstract. I don’t know what you’d call it . . . musique concrète, loops and that, which was a picture of the revolution.

Blackburn: That was the last track, wasn’t it, on The Beatles double LP?

Lennon: Just before Ringo does a Hollywood bit [“Good Night”], yeah. So that was a picture I painted in sound of the revolution, which was complete murder and killing and people screaming and kids crying and all that, which is what I really thought it would be. . . .

Blackburn: Could I just ask you how this ties into analysis? I get the idea that most analysis is working people through their pain into the world. This guy [Lennon and Ono’s analyst, Arthur Janov] doesn’t seem to be doing that; he’s doing the opposite. He’s bringing—

Lennon: His thing is to feel our pain, not come to terms with it. We come to terms with it ourselves to survive to the age we are. All the repression pains, which are caused by childhood, aren’t literally repressed in you; they come out in arthritis or asthma or whatever. People with asthma and thyroid things are being cured in his place by allowing themselves . . . they’re literally trying to kill themselves to get parents’ love in a way: “Look, Mommy, now will you love me? I’m a cripple.”

And we put it somewhere or other. I put it into my eyes literally: I experienced moments of not wanting to see when I was a child, not wanting to see the ugliness. Not wanting to see not being wanted went into my eyes and into my mind. And he [Janov] doesn’t just put you back [in childhood] to talk about it . . . you do most of the work yourself, actually. Once they’ve started on you, it just happens yourself. Once the machinery for feeling everything that goes on to you is open, you can’t stop it. After thirty years of repressing feeling and putting it in my backbone or in my neck—

Blackburn: Well, what’s left after his—

Lennon: You’re left with yourself and still with the ability to feel daily. Almost daily, we primal, which is cry. Every morning most of us wake up in fear. That’s your weakest moment, when you first wake up, and that’s usually when your heart’s pounding for no reason you can think of. That’s just the basic fear inside all of us.

Instead of having your heart going like clappers or some strain in your back and just either taking a pill or saying, “I’ll get over it, I’ll have a bath,” you let your mind go to that pain. And after you’ve been through the therapy, the pain itself will regurgitate the memory that originally caused you to suppress it into your heart. So you sort of lie there, and your mind goes to this pain, and it goes, “Oh, 1943, this happened.” It comes out literally like that, and you cry about it. You feel that feeling.

Blackburn: But even through analysis, you can’t cancel out what’s happened, can you?

Lennon: No, no, no. It’s like all the pain was always channeled into whatever—sex or masturbation or dreaming or God or whatever it is. But once the channels are open for the pain, when you feel pain, the pain actually goes to the right channels, and you express it the right way—which is crying, like children do. But for men, we’re told not to cry from an early age. We have to repress ourselves all that time. And there’s no harm in crying. You cry, you feel good, like a kid does. It’s like after acid. The therapy was literally like a six-month very slow acid trip. The difference between acid and the therapy is acid unleashes all these feelings. There’s so many of them, and they’re not channeled in the right direction.

Blackburn: Because you don’t know what’s happening.

Lennon: Well, you do, actually. You get used to it, and you can work it out. But after all those years of channeling it the wrong way, when people have acid they hallucinate, because the pain and the awareness of feeling that you get on those drugs is so much that you cannot take it. It’s too much at once and you hallucinate or whatever you do—trip off, away from reality. And the therapy was like a very slow acid trip, which happens naturally within the body.

It’s hard to talk about crying and pain and all that. It sounds sort of arbitrary. But the word pain to me now has a different meaning, because of having physically felt all these extraordinary repressions I had. And feeling is a different word to me, because after therapy and after big primals, it was like taking gloves off. You could feel your own skin for the first time. It was like I’d been wearing gloves all me life, and suddenly there was a literal feeling in my hands.

I don’t like talking about it, because it sounds so abstract. You can’t really understand if the vocabulary is different between people who’ve done it and haven’t done it. It’s a bit of a drag to say that . . . but just the simple pain of living—that’s part of a dissolving of the God trip or father-figure trip. Always looking for some kind of heaven. I mean, intellectually I knew that it was yin-yang or black-and-white continually or dialectic materialism—it’s the same thing, really. And once God’s out of the way, the main asset is to realize there’s no good and bad. There’s a bit of it in every day, and you just go through it.

Blackburn: You trace that pain first to the family.

Lennon: Oh, yeah. It’s directly involved with the family. I mean, the family’s what shapes you.

Blackburn: I take it you don’t mean your family in particular.

Lennon: No, every family. The extraordinary thing is my father and mother split—I never saw my father till I was like twenty—so I’m an extreme case. But Yoko had her parents there, but she never had ’em. The lyrics of “Mother,” which said, “You had me and I never had you,” applies to people with parents too . . .

Blackburn: More subtly, perhaps.

Lennon: Yeah, but see, she went through the same pain.

Ono: More pain, really. It’s like when you’re hungry, instead of getting a cheeseburger, you get a film of a cheeseburger, and it doesn’t do you any good.

Lennon: It affects the middle class even more because they’re so formalized. There’s more middle-class people in this thing [therapy] because they can afford it, and they’re the ones that are cracking up. And the middle classes are really repressed; they’re the most repressed people. They have all these formalities with their parents, and actually touching is out. It’s like intellectual love. Or like she says, films of love. And she was in that school of pain.

Ono: I always wished my mother died so I could at least get decent sympathy, you know. [Laughs.] But there she was, a perfectly beautiful mother. Everybody’d say, “How lucky you are to have a mother like that.” When it wasn’t really true. I wasn’t lucky to have a mother with—

Blackburn: In a way, what the parents are doing is transmitting to their children the fact that their lives have been fucked up.

Ono: Exactly!

Lennon: They can’t give because they’ve never been given to. But the problem for most people, and extraordinarily enough for me, who’d had no real impression that my mother actually wanted me—or father—because she wasn’t there. But still one of the hardest things is to realize that actually they didn’t want you: you’re just the result of a fuck. Not many of us are planned. And in fact, their own need is so great that they cannot possibly give to you.

So to allow yourself to feel your own want is a big problem. The thing we all seem to greatly fear is to show the want we have of love from other people, especially parents. To feel it and acknowledge it in your mind: “No, they didn’t want me. That is a fact. I was not wanted. No wonder I feel shitty.” ’Cause I couldn’t explain it as a child. You just know that something is not right, something is not there. And that is the big trauma, to experience that.

And especially the middle-class people who have nice, imagey parents, smiling and all dolled up. They’re the ones that have the biggest struggle to say, “Good-bye, Mommy, good-bye, Daddy. I never had you, and I must realize that I never had you and I never will.” The middle-class people in the therapy were continually going back to their parents just to see, “Maybe I can tell them about this experience I’ve had, and I understand them,” but the parents could not associate with it.

Blackburn: On the record, I listened several times to that “Mommy’s Dead” track [actually “My Mummy’s Dead.” —Ed.], and then I suddenly realized it reminded me of something. Then it seemed like perhaps it was “Three Blind Mice.”

Lennon: It was just a feeling. It was almost like a haiku poem. Actually, I got into haiku in Japan just recently. I think it’s fantastic. God, it’s beautiful. We bought some haiku originals when we were there. But obviously when you get rid of a whole section of illusion in your mind, you’re left with a precision. The difference between haiku and Longfellow or something is immense. Longfellow says, “Oh, beautiful yellow flowers standing quietly in the shadowy electric light,” when the haiku would just say, “Yellow flowers in a white bowl on a wooden table” and that gives you the whole picture.

Blackburn: It looks much more simple, but like your music is now, it can in fact be listened to many, many times to get into it.

Lennon: Because people’s perception of reality . . . they’re not used to it, they don’t know what it is. So when a simple haiku or a simple statement is made, they’re not used to it. They’re used to devious intellectual ways of feeling things. I don’t know what people who aren’t intellectuals do to arrive at the point, but they probably go through some mystic Walt Disney scene . . .

Blackburn: Religion is a very popular need for the reason that you say.

Ono: It’s a convention.

Blackburn: But it’s more than a convention in that people need religion; it covers up the pain.

Lennon: Religion is a legalized madness—that’s what Janov says. You have to allow it. If the government stopped them . . . like all those stories—1984, when they replace God with a bomb or a rocket. I mean, they’ve even discussed it in America: What would we do if we had no war or no rocket to the moon? We’ve got to give them something to replace the religion thing. I think it was him or George [Orwell] who said opium is the religion of the people now instead of religion is the opium of the people. That’s what’s happening.

Blackburn: Actually, Marx said that in that essay, that early one. He also said, “Religion is the heart of the heartless world.” There’s a fantastic passage that’s very like the God is—

Lennon: A concept.

Blackburn: But I’m sure you haven’t—

Lennon: No, no. [Rolling Stone editor Jann] Wenner, when he interviewed me, said, “Do you realize that lots of philosophers or whoever had talked about God being a concept by which we measure our pain?” . . . It wasn’t my own revelation. It [my line] was based on something maharishi once said, which was time was a concept by which we measure . . . oh, what was it?

Ono: By which we measure eternity.

Lennon: Eternity. Which is pretty cool. I used that basis to put what I thought about God. But a lot of kids wrote to me via Rolling Stone, saying, “Well, what about joy? God is a concept by which we measure our joy, John,” and all that. So they obviously—

Ono: They were mad.

Lennon: Well, apart from being mad, they were just disappointed that I wasn’t saying that. When you’ve got joy, you don’t think about God much. It’s only when you’re in pain that you start thinking . . .

Blackburn: Look, the people who always have the most intense religious experience are those who are very oppressed and very miserable. Blacks in the States, Indians in Mexico. These are the people who really are obsessed by religion.

Lennon: It’s no accident that there’s so many fag priests. Like a fag has done—if any of you are fags, excuse me—they’ve completely reversed their roles to please Mommy and Daddy. They’ve gone so far that they’ve reversed themselves [and they say], “Now do you love me? I’ve not been what I was; I’m now something else for you. Will this suit you?” And Mommy says, “Yes, good boy, come home . . .”

Blackburn: Or it’s a revolt perhaps against their parents’ classification.

Lennon: I don’t think so, because the fags are usually very close with Mother. There’s no getting away from it.

Blackburn: That’s true, yes.

Lennon: Another interesting thing: somebody recently wrote a book about all the prime ministers here and their life. I didn’t read the book, but I read praises of it. That all the main prime ministers we’ve ever had, including [Sir Edward] Heath—apart from being short people, which that myth seems to be true—they repress themselves so much that they don’t grow for Mommy and Daddy’s sake. “Look, I’m still a little boy and I’ll be good for ya.” But most of the prime ministers of Britain have been repressed kids with strange childhoods or loss of parents and things like that.

Blackburn: You can argue that about lots of people. Most very creative artists—

Lennon: Sure, I agree.

Blackburn: It doesn’t discredit them.

Lennon: It doesn’t discredit them. But art is only a way of expressing pain. I mean, the reason she does such far-out stuff is her pain is expressed in a far-out way. It’s a far-out kind of pain. The only reason for sure why I’m a star is because of my repression. Nothing else would have driven me to do all that. I mean, why would I do it if I was normal?

Ono: And happy.

Lennon: And happy. The only reason you go for that goal is because you want to say, “Now will you love me? Look, I’m prime minister,” or “I’m head of a department.”

Blackburn: That is the driving force, but how people come to terms with it themselves can be in two different ways. I remember once when I met [British prime minister Harold] Wilson, I thought, What a shriveled up guy he is. To be successful, he’s completely repressed any human emotions he might have shown. And I got the impression in your interview [with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner] that when you were a successful Beatle, when you were playing the game, you didn’t even know you were so successful. I mean, I suppose the most fantastic success of the mid-twentieth century but you still were oppressed by it.

Lennon: Oh, Jesus Christ, it was complete oppression. We had to go through humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classes and showbiz and lord mayors. It was complete humiliation for me, because I could never keep me mouth shut. [Ono laughs.] I’d always be drunk or pilled or something to counteract this pressure. And it was hell.

Ono: He was actually deprived more than anything. It’s not like he was enjoying the success and being happy.

Lennon: It’s a very miserable feeling. Apart from the first blush of making it, your first number-one record—thrilling; first to break into America—thrilling. That was some sort of objective: “Well, I want to be as big as Elvis” or something like that. Moving forward was the great thing. But actually attaining it was a big letdown.

Blackburn: At one point, it seemed like really everybody was using you.

Lennon: Sure.

Blackburn: Wilson wants to get votes by—

Lennon: And the only reason we wouldn’t pose with Heath was because he’d insulted me in the House about my book In His Own Write by saying, “If this boy had been educated, he would have been a good writer.” That’s what he said about me, so we wouldn’t go anywhere near them. And anyway, we were socialists at heart, and we presumed that Harold would be better than Heath. It was a big letdown for all of us, but it turned out to be better than this. Like [Australian author] Richard Neville said, there’s an inch difference between them [Wilson and Heath], and that’s an inch in which we live. I think it’s true in a way.

Ali: I mean, the Labour government did in fact almost equally nasty things in its time. After all, it kept the blacks out of Kenya nation—

Lennon: Oh sure, sure. That was bad, but it’s nothing as bad as now . . . [Black leader] Michael [X] said that as soon as they came in, it was just—

Blackburn: You don’t know. Wilson could have changed on that; he changed on a lot of things. This isn’t about living in that inch. What Richard said is quite true, but still, we shouldn’t be wanting to live in that inch. . . . Heath may be doing us a good turn by forcing us out—

Lennon: I thought of that, too, that he’s putting us in a corner so we have to do something . . .

Blackburn: You’ve got to find out what’s oppressing other people, too.

Ono: That’s why meeting is so important, meeting with each other.

Lennon: Well, the first thing we did when we got back [to England] was contact you and Richard Neville and Michael [X], because in your individual ways you represent the movement in different spheres, all the different aspects of it. And we got messages abroad that complete repression was going on. You even said it in Red Mole, apart from Richard Neville’s anarchist tendencies, all power to him because you’ll be next, sure as hell you will.

Blackburn: And actually, that’s begun to happen now. A lot of the political groups have been raided in the last few weeks, in the wake of that explosion—

Ali: Now in many parts of the country we’re receiving information, even in towns which seem politically dead, where Red Mole sellers go out onto the streets: the police just refuse to allow the comrades to sell the paper on the streets.

Lennon: Can’t you get it out through universities?

Ali: We are. We’re doing it a lot through universities. But what worries them now is that more and more Red Moles are being sold to young workers who aren’t bugged about all the old Daily Worker and Morning Star—

Lennon: I get it every day to see if there’s any hope, but it just seems to be in the nineteenth century.

Ali: It is.

Lennon: So if you can get at the young workers—because obviously when you’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty, that’s when you’re most ripe for . . . that’s when you’re most idealistic and have less fear. What I was trying to do in the Rolling Stone article was influence all the people I can influence who are still under a dream—to just put a big question mark in their mind: “Well, if great guru John says there’s no God and it’s all pain, maybe the acid dream is over.” I’m trying to tell them that is over.

Blackburn: But also there was a very good bit in the interview where he [Jann Wenner] asks you what’s really changed. It seems like the great Cultural Revolution wasn’t—

Lennon: Oh, yeah. Bullshit, yeah.

Blackburn: You were saying about how the same people were in power—

Lennon: Sure, sure. . . . We cut our hair specifically for that reason, to stop that identification parade going on, that anybody with long hair was a socialist or radical.

Ali: Absolutely.

Lennon: So to confuse those image followers, we keep changing.

Blackburn: Also, I notice you’re wearing air force clothes.

Lennon: Well, there’s many reasons for that. During the therapy, we weren’t supposed to repress anything, and we all became children literally, and we were all eating ice cream in America. All the people on therapy were just eating like children. Because when you’re reliving your childhood you become that, and we put on twenty or thirty pounds just during that period. So I couldn’t wear any of me clothes. I was not going to buy a new set of clothes for this figure, so I got these. It was as simple as that. And also they’re functional. Before I’d wear jeans, but now I can’t fit into any of them, so this is the next-best thing. And it’s bloody functional. And I don’t normally go anywhere where you need a tie, anyway, so . . . I was fed up with being a peacock. I decided I was an artist, not a model. So that was the changing point.

Blackburn: It is true that in the Red Mole we can get into contact now with the young workers, but the barriers are still immense. You say that in “Working Class Hero”—the song about the “fucking peasants.”

Lennon: Yeah.

Blackburn: Do you think that, as an artist, you can help to destroy [that barrier] . . . because it’s really a cultural subordination, isn’t it? Thinking that you’ve always got to be dominated and led.

Lennon: Yeah. Well, it’s a cozy feeling for them, like being in prison. You don’t have to think. You take your position and stick with it, and it’s that, really, which is the problem.

Ono: Plus the desire for a father . . .

Lennon: Yeah, nice big company to look after you and all that.

Ali: The Rolls-Royce crowd seems to have somewhat disproved that.

Lennon: Right, right. Well, the more of that that happens, the better in a way for the workers in the long run.

Blackburn: You know that ten thousand workers held shares in that company under a scheme that was touted as workers and capitalists getting together?

Lennon: Like the Japanese do.

Blackburn: No, they’ve lost not only their jobs but all their life savings.

Ali: Rolls-Royce is a very paternalist firm. “We really look after our workers. We give them a few shares . . .”

Blackburn: Also, the unions were very tame there—

Lennon: Well, they’re more like the Japanese unions, which is just company-run.

Well, I don’t know about that problem. Because it seems to me that all the revolutions have either happened with a Fidel or a Marx or a Khrushchev or whatever it was in the early days who were literally intellectuals, whether they were workers or not, and they got a good pocket of people. And I don’t know how they got through to the workers except that the workers were in a more repressed state than they seemingly are here. See, the Americans have woken up in a way to the fact that two cars and two tellies does not answer it. But here they haven’t had it long and they’re still—

Blackburn: But John, it seems to me that in a way this is where the revolutionary artist comes in. Because the workers here are repressed not by guns but by ideas.

Ali: The whole ideas of the ruling class.

Blackburn: It’s television and the spectacle. And you’re part of that, or you were and then you freaked out of it. But in a sense you’re still benefiting.

Lennon: Sure, sure. I’m not sure what to do or where me place is now. I woke up, so I have to sniff around and see what my place is and what I can do, which is why we’re all talking.

Blackburn: I think maybe in the [Rolling Stone] interview or somewhere else, I read about your influences. Obviously, most of them came from the States, didn’t they? There isn’t a native tradition here, which is really revolutionary in a cultural sense. Or is there? Perhaps the Newcastle mining towns—

Lennon: The thing was, [when I started,] rock ’n’ roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation then. I think the reason was because we were so unfeeling and repressed, that [we needed] something as basic and as loud as rock ’n’ roll . . . to get through [to us].

Blackburn: And also it had to be simple—

Lennon: Yeah . . . and I’ve forgotten what the question was.

Blackburn: About whether there was something in England that—

Lennon: We all were very conscious of being imitation Americans in the early days. But we delved into the music and found out that it was half white country western and half black rock ’n’ roll, African. And most of the country songs basically came from England—all those train songs. Sure they did, Scotland and Ireland. The basic folk song comes from Europe. So it was just a cultural exchange.

I mean, they went to America and Americanized the songs, and they sang about working on the railroads, and the blacks sang about working in the cotton fields. But all the basic songs . . . like lots of Dylan’s basic songs are Scottish, Irish, or English folk songs. So that made us feel better. We delved into that side of it. But the more interesting songs to me were the black ones, because they were simpler. And they just sort of said, “Shake your ass and shake your prick about,” which was quite an innovation, really.

Blackburn: Look, the good thing about that is that it’s getting you to do something, whereas some of the folk-song tradition is about losing.

Lennon: Well, folk songs are completely middle-class, you see. As kids we were opposed to folk songs because it was all middle-class—same as jazz. It was college students with big scarves and a pint of beer and singing folk songs in what we call la-de-da. [Breaks into song.] “I worked in the mine in Newcastle” and all that shit. [Laughter.] And there was very few real folk singers. . . . I liked [Irish songwriter] Dominic Behan a bit, and there was quite a folk-song tradition in Liverpool, and country and western. But the country and western was complete cowboy gook. But the folk songs, most of them were middle-class kids just singing in very fruity voices.

I heard a few sometimes very old records of real workers singing the songs, and even now you occasionally see on TV some Irish still singing them—the actual people that work every day and go to the pubs singing the songs—and the power of them like that is fantastic, and I began to get a little more interested. But my own class prejudice was that folk songs had always been on the BBC with fruity voices and had nothing to do with folk music. They were just sort of classical reproductions keeping alive some old tradition. It was a bit boring, like ballet or something. . . . Today’s folk song was rock ’n’ roll even though it happened to emulate from America. That was not really important in the end, because then we wrote our own, and that changed it.

Blackburn: Oddly enough, some of your songs, even when the lyrics were almost nursery lyrics—like “Yellow Submarine,” for example . . . Do you know—you probably do—that that was used by workers on strike? And at the LSE [London School of Economics], we had a version of it, which was, “We are all living in a red LSE.” And workers had a version of it—

Ali: “We’re all living on bread and margarine.” They heckled Harold Wilson outside the Labour Party conference, singing, “We’re all living on bread and margarine.”

Lennon: That’s great. I like that. I enjoyed when the football crowds in the early days would sing things like “Yellow Submarine” and “All Together Now,” which is another one that we put out. It just said, “All together now, all together now, all together now” all the time. And I was pleased when “Give Peace a Chance” became a sort of anthem thing. I’d written it with that in mind, really, hoping that instead of singing “We Shall Overcome” from 1800 or whatever it is, that they would sing something [current]. I felt an obligation even then to write something that people would sing actually in the pub or in a demonstration.

Blackburn: That was thinking very politically, actually, wasn’t it?

Lennon: Well, I’ve always been politically minded. I’ve never not been political. I mean, religion tended to overshadow it during the acid days, which was probably ’65–’66, and that was almost a direct result of being in that repressed, superstar position, and then religion was an outlet for that. [I thought,] There’s something else to come; this isn’t it, surely? There’s more to come.

But I’ve always been political. In the two books I wrote, even though they were in sort of [James] Joycean gobbledygook, there’s plenty of . . . There’s a play about a worker and a capitalist. There’s many knocks at religion. I’ve been satirizing religion from childhood in books . . . I used to always write magazines at school and hand them around and things like that. So I’ve always been conscious of that, and very conscious of class. They used to say there was a chip on me shoulder. There still is. Because I know what happened to me. I know all the class repression that happened to me; it was a fucking fact. But of course in the hurricane Beatle world, it got a bit left out, you know.

Blackburn: [With the Beatles,] you disproved the class system—

Lennon: Yeah, there was a feeling that the workers had broken through, but I realized in retrospect it was like they allowed blacks to be runners and footballers or boxers; that’s the choice. But now you can be a pop star. I mean, that’s the outlet they’ve given you to be something, which is what I really say on my album.

Blackburn: None of the American groups have dared tackle class yet, even when they shout about revolution.

Lennon: Because they’re all middle class, and they don’t want to show that they’re middle class and they’re bourgeois.

Blackburn: They’re scared of the workers, actually.

Lennon: Sure they are, because the workers are mainly right-wing in America, clinging onto their goods. But as soon as they realize what their class has done, then it’s up to them to repatriate the people. But even during the Beatle heyday, I think it was me mainly and George who insisted—we’d been to America a few times—and [manager Brian] Epstein had always tried to waffle us about talking about Vietnam. So there came a time when George and I said, “Listen, when they ask us next time, we’re gonna say we don’t like it, we think they should get out.” And that’s what we did—which was pretty radical for the Fab Four at the time.

Ali: Yeah. It had a phenomenal effect also in the States. It brought up all these right-wing radio commentators who’d been drooling about the Beatles: “They showed their true colors.”

Lennon: Yeah, it was the first opportunity which I personally took to wave the flag a bit. I’d always held that repression. But it was so involved and the going was so pressurized that there was hardly any means of expressing yourself at that rate. We were just working continually, touring continually, and always kept in this cocoon. And it’s pretty hard, when you are Caesar, and everybody’s saying how wonderful you are and giving you all the goodies and all the girls, to break out of that. It’s hard to say, “Well, I don’t want to be king. I want to be real.” And the second big sort of political thing was when I said the Beatles are bigger than Jesus. That really broke the scene. I mean, I nearly got shot in America. That was another big trauma for all the kids following us.

Ali: When did you first start thinking about Vietnam, and did it play any part in accelerating your radicalization?

Lennon: I don’t really remember. I just remember that we’d had this unspoken policy of not getting involved by answering any questions. I always read most of the newspapers, whether it was shit or not, and read the political bits. And I think the continual awareness of it, as it grew in me, made me feel ashamed that I wasn’t saying anything, and that’s when it sort of burst out of that period. Because I couldn’t play that game anymore. It just was too much for me, the pressure of shutting up. I had to say something. And it was just a buildup, I think. I can’t remember first being aware of that war.

Blackburn: Yeah.

Lennon: It was obvious that I would become more aware of it going to America where it was happening and being approached by underground [press] or whatever it was, although mainly it was capitalist press that saw us. There was always somebody there grinding in some way or other. So . . . I can’t remember an exact time.

Blackburn: Could I just return to one point from earlier? You were talking about folk and black music. It seems to me that one of the big problems about folk music is it’s sort of depressing. It’s sort of [about] losing, whereas black music is about fighting. And I think even in Dylan’s best songs, you somehow feel they’ve had it. Maybe it’s because it comes out of struggles that were a long time ago.

Lennon: Most urban blues and things like that were mainly about sex and fighting each other on the street over a woman or something. The field songs were mainly just expressing the pain they were in. That’s what I like about it, ’cause they couldn’t express themselves intellectually so they had to say in very few words what was happening to them. And it was really self-expression. Because there were many different pockets of blues. Originally it was in the fields, and then as they moved to Chicago and places like that, it developed into city blues. It was still an expression of their own individual pain, not the black man in general, but there was never any solution given. It was always, “God will save us.” They were laboring under that problem, that God always pervaded their songs. So I don’t think there were any answers given. . . .

Blackburn: You’ve said you don’t think answers can be given.

Lennon: I don’t think answers can be given. The first thing one can do is to state your own positions, which is what they did with their songs. And then I think the second thing is to find out who else thinks like you, and then there’s a group, which is what’s evolving there now. And only just recently have they started singing about the war, the blacks, or any kind of revolution. Apart from people like Nina Simone. But most of the blacks, like [comedian and activist] Dick Gregory said, are still doing the boogaloo.

But there is a big change now, with Edwin Starr [who had a July 1970 hit with the song “War”] and all that making more records and stating black positions and black is beautiful and all the rest of it is a big change; it’s only happened in the last two years. So they’ve come to that point now, where they’re expressing themselves completely, solidly, and expressing opinions on the position rather than just saying, “I’m in pain, man.” They’re saying, “We’re in pain, and this is why.”