Oh Yoko!

Oh Yoko!

There's something very appealing to me about being unpopular, of going
against the grain simply by being you. It's hard to believe now, what
with the tabloids filled with silly fillies, with thongs peeking above
waistbands, that Ms Ono was such a big deal. But apparently she was, if
the news reel of her and her toyboy JL getting done for having a blim
of hash is anything to go by. There's a protective ring of coppers
around them, no doubt guarding them from the likes of the woman who
shouts

"John, she's 'orrible! Cynthia's better than 'er."

As God is my witness, I hope the tabloids find you one day, so I do. I
wonder what you're like now - fat and flabby, perhaps. Leaving in
schemie heaven with a satellite dish, even? As for the woman you
slated, well I picked up a DJ mag in WH Smiths yesterday to see that
she recently DJed at some cool London nightspot, and that some equally
cool DJs want to remix her music. Not bad for a gal who's pushing
seventy.

But let's not be too hard on the girl whose claim to fame probably ever
remains slagging off Yoko Ono on celluloid. How may Beatle fans could
identify with the second Mrs. Lennon, after all? And without wanting to
be mean to Cynthia, John's first wife, when you fall you gotta go.
Falling in love, making that all-important mental connection that the
poets harp on about, it's gotta be like turning on the telly to see the
Pistols bantering with Grundy, after the Osmond Show has been on all
bloody week.

All power to the woman who fell for a pre-Saturn return musician (for
those who don't know, it's a bumpy ride around the age of thirty), a
man into whose orbit she refused to disappear as if she was the English
nicey next door. Oh no, Ono got JL walking around in a big paper bag,
getting his kit off for the lads (and lasses!) and making funny music.
She bothered people, and their partnership bothered folk who couldn't
see the attraction. After all, an older foreign woman with a penchant
for weirdness, who thought that the Beatles were the height of naff.
She wasn't a fan and she didn't think much of his 'I'm-a-superstar'
attitude. Well, she didn't deserve him, did she?

I started to take an interest in Yoko just before John Lennon's death.
As the product of a young mother, I was bound to hear all about the
Beatles, even ten years after their break-up. I saw the fateful 'Let It
Be' docu-film on the telly, with all the lads arguing. Meanwhile, Yoko
sat at John's side. It seemed pretty obvious which relationship would
buckle. I heard that Yoko 'split up' the Beatles, but 'moan tae fuck,
be serious! We're all grown up now, and we can all put our hands up to
the fact that your mates take more of a backseat role when you've been
zapped. My God, I thought, this woman must be important, because a lot
of people still give her credit for causing such a lot of trouble. Who
is she anyway?

One day at school, a classmate told me how her dad, a removals man, had
been called to Tittenhurst Park, a big house in the country. The folk
were moving to America, it seemed. He turned up with his team, and they
were just manoeuvring some heavy items out of the house when a small
Japanese woman, all in black with matching long, wavy hair, calmly
walked into the room, laid out a sleeping bag in the middle of their
goings-on and went to sleep without a word. The workmen looked at each
other awkwardly, probably in a similar way that Mr. And Mrs. John
Lennon looked at each other when the same small Japanese woman got into
their car with them, one evening back in '68.

"Silly bint!" laughed my friend Jane. But all I could think was... how
did she manage to keep a straight face? And what did her husband say
about it? Maybe he was used to her being a mad cow.

After her husband's death, there was a rush of Lennon memorabilia.
Yoko's book, Grapefruit, was re-issued, so I bought a copy. God, she
was barking!

'Carry a bag of dried peas around with you' she wrote. Then you could
leave a pea wherever you went. Fantastic!

Or how about this one? 'Kill all the men you have slept with. Take
their bones and throw them into the lake in Central Park.'

OK, disclaimer time here. I laughed when I read that, but would I take
her advice? No, I think it would be far funnier to line most of them up
alive and do it. Maybe Sarah Jessica Parker would like to consider it
for a future 'Sex in the City' episode. In fact, Carrie, Miranda, Sam
and Charlotte are quite welcome to bring some of their own along and
we'll make it a party.

So back to the book. John Lennon said he read bits of it, and it either
made it feel him tops or bloody awful. You should have skipped the
'Paint till you bleed' page, John.

A few years after John's death, Yoko gigged around the UK. Her music
had always been an acquired taste, mixing Kabuki-style screeching with
hubbie's more trad rock, but it worked. But being an Aquarian, she was
ahead of her time and she and John knew it. Hence she jump started her
younger man out of his Northern English git chauvinism and he penned
'Woman is the Nigger of the World', an ode which liberal whitey found
hard to stomach! She sighed when her ambitions were being consumed by
the same male ego, and packed it off to LA with another woman, while
she got on with being herself instead of Mrs. Lennon. And she
introduced her man to New York City, where he said he was happy.

And so few came to see Yoko when she gigged that time, though I Imagine
that she would have seen the room as half-full. But ten years later at
the Astoria in London, boy was that a different story! The venue was
packed, and if my ex-lover is to be believed, there were a few famous
names on the guest list that night. As well as the starstruck old
Scotsman I dated, the place was teaming with indiepop kids with pink
hair. After the show - you couldn't get anywhere near the stage - I
chatted to an Asian girl, who enthused about Ms. Ono's
performance.

"Wasn't like this when I saw her ten years ago" I said to the
girl.

"You saw her then? Oh WOW!" she answered. She then broke off and went
to chat to a couple of Japanese girls, who hugged her as a long lost
friend.

"You know who that was, don't you?" asked my friend Sarah. No, I
answered. "It was Sonia from Echobelly, that's who." I took her word
for it, Sarah being a bit glazed over celebs herself. Cool, I thought,
she had been friendly. Meanwhile, Sean Ono Lennon thanked us all for
coming to see them and invited us all back to a party at their place.
(Where were you?)

And so it had all begun to work out for the woman who split up the
Beatles. The DJ on the radio said that the Tom Tom Club's 'Wordy
Rapping Hood' had been directly influenced by "the work of Miss Yoko
Ono." The B52s covered 'Don't Worry Kyoko'. My friend Sandra saw them
play at Hammersmith Palais in London, and stood open-mouthed at their
performance. Changed my life, she told me years later. Courtney Love,
sometimes compared to Yoko herself, screeched twenty-something angst on
'Pretty on the Inside' and wrote a song called '30 years at the
Dakota'. Or maybe it was 20 years; it doesn't matter, we know what she
was getting at.

Meanwhile, a blonde Mancunian rounded on me for snogging another
woman's boyfriend. Well, she's his Yoko, and she got him back
undamaged. But it brought out the beast in the blonde, a girl you could
liken to Bette Lynch on a good day. She's a muso herself, and cites
Courtney as the role model of every woman who dares to rock. But who
inspired Courtney to ply her trade? And what gave Baby Bette such a
headache about my actions? Had her mother swelled with pride, as she
told Baby Bette about the day she hollered at John Lennon, for falling
in love with a woman so very unlike her? I wonder...