Original subtitles

I think it's the best thing I've ever done.

I think it's realistic,

and it's true to the me that has been developing over the years,

I like first-person music.

But because of my hang-ups and many other things,

I would only now and then specifically write about me.

And now I wrote all about me,

and that's why I like it, it's me, and nobody else.

We just liked the idea of this really raw, basic...

truthful reality that we were gonna be giving to the world.

The sparseness of the band and the force of John,

that's why he's one of the greats. That's how it is.

The power, the strength of when an artist of that quality

and that imagination, that creativity,

reaches such truths about themselves,

can be overhelming.

John is so special because he writes right away what he feels.

You can hear on Plastic Ono Band, probably more than on any other album,

the quality of his singing, it's verz exposed,

and it withstands that exposure.

He sent me the album, and I had group therapy that night,

and I played it,

and I saw 50 people in a heap, all crzing,

it just touched them enormously.

It was almost exhausting, the first time you heard it.

It's a statement, and then some,

and the braverz is immense.

It's so incredible. The emotion on this record is just mind-blowing.

He felt constrained by the Beatles for quite some time,

and this well preceded the break of the Beatles

and I think that his relationship with Yoko and his meeting Yoko

just made that obvious to him

that there were so many other things going on in the world

and possibilities for art and what he was thinking.

I actually didn't want to fall in love with him

because there were so many other concerns

and I'm sure that John had the same kind of hesitation.

We had baggages.

It was not just sort of like falling in love with somebody you met in the street

and he looked good, or something,

there were so many different aspects of the situation.

We stimulated each other,

and opened the kind of world that we didn't know for each other,

and it was verz fruitful.

When he was with the Beatles, there was a concern, I'm sure, that he had

to not go too far out and ruin the thing for the other three.

The Beatles were still active when John decided that...

the Beatles themselves shouldn't be his sole musical outlet.

He needed some other outlet, and he formed the Plastic Ono Band.

Plastic Ono Band was a concept of Yoko's,

which is an imaginarz band.

There was an offer from Berlin that I should do a concert.

And I thought, "Why don't I do a verz original concert

"and have tape recorders and radios in plastic stands inside,

"like those are the people."

And I liked that idea, but I couldn't do it because I got together with John.

I said, "I was gonna do that, but..."

And he said, "Like this?"

And he took some plastic implements

that had toothbrush in, or whatever, all these little ones,

just put it together and said, "Like this?"

"This is Plastic Ono Band."

And the first advert was a page out of the London telephone book of the Joneses,

and pictures of these plastic things,

and the advert said, "You are the Plastic Ono Band."

And the Plastic Ono Band was interesting in that it became obvious early on

that it could take any form he wanted.

It wasn't just going to be four people,

a replica of John, Paul, George and Ringo,

it was plastic, it could be anYthing.

We first did the bed-in in Amsterdam,

and the point of the bed-in, in a nutshell, was a commercial for peace

as opposed to a commercial for war, which was on the news everz day.

Everz day it was dismembered bodies and napalm.

The bed-in was seven days, because the press were always asking questions,

seven days of they can ask anYthing, no secrets,

till you got everything you need to know about John and Yoko,

or what we stand for, what we are.

We both felt that it was an incredibly good idea, the bed-in,

and we were totally excited about how we were expressing it.

We were always thinking about ourselves

as performance art, or art or music,

and so I thought, "This is priceless as a performance artwork."

John called me and he said

that they wanted to do a band called Plastic Ono Band,

and I got sort of worried

thinking, great to play with John, but what's it going to be?

With Yoko, Plastic Ono, sounds funny,

maybe have to be naked up on stage or something, I didn't know.

So I asked him to explain it to me.

I told Eric Clapton and Klaus that I was leaving

and I'd like to probably use them as a group.

We hadn't decided how to do it,

to have a permanent new group or what,

and then I thought, "Fuck it, I'm not gonna get stuck with another set of people,

"whoever they are."

I announced it myself and to the people around me on the way to Toronto.

So we were on the plane and didn't have any rehearsal,

and they made the last row on the plane free for us,

which was right next to the turbos of the plane, which was nice and loud.

So we sat there trzing to rehearse,

and he played Cold Turkey, and he was singing...

...and I thought, "What a great song."

This song, the lyrics... the shivers went down my spine.

I've always expressed what I've been feeling or thinking at the time,

however badly or not, from early Beatles' records on.

It became more conscious later.

So I was just writing the experience I'd had of withdrawing from heroin.

He was always...

putting something in the song that was him, of course,

but when he was doing the Beatles he must have had a different attitude,

and now he could really do it.

- Do you like Yoko's singing? - I'm pretty influenced by it.

If you hear Cold Turkey, at the end of it, ladies and gentlemen -

RRP six and nine, out now -

if you hear Cold Turkey, at the end of it,

I'm getting towards singing, or letting the voice go as much as Yoko does.

Having spent so much time making the Beatles masterpieces -

Sgt. Pepper took a long time to make -

Lennon really wanted to get back

to a much more immediate way of making records.

So I think when he started making solo records

he wanted to make them as quickly

and with as little fuss and as little technical sophistication as possible.

I remember on Instant Karma, it's verz, verz simple.

It was done in one day -

Instant Karma, instant song, instant playing.

It was great, cos I wrote it in the morning on the piano, like I've said many times,

and I went to the office and I sang it,

and I thought, "Hell, let's do it," and we booked the studio.

And this time there was this little man coming in,

with his high voice, saying, "Can you put this instrument a little higher?"

And he was talking and doing things,

and I thought, "Who the fuck is this?" I didn't know who that was.

That was Phil Spector.

Phil came in, he said, "How do you want it?" I said, "1950 but now."

He said, "Right."

And I did it in about three goes,

and went in, and he played it back, and there it was.

I did a rough mix.

I hadn't quite got everything up, fader-wise, or track-wise,

and Lennon said, "That'll do, I'll take a copy."

Off, and that was it, that was the master,

a rough mix at the end of the session.

Cold Turkey and Instant Karma were verz much the prototypes

for what he was about to do. He was stripping things down,

making things simpler, making his concerns more personal.

The Plastic Ono Band, which was his first solo album,

was based most clearly on his experiences in primal therapy.

It was all this pent-up stuff

that was floating around in his mind for years.

We'd get so many books from people,

and there was a book called Primal Scream that came to us

and John was saying, "This is you! This is great." And he started reading.

They were supposed to review the book, but

they asked me to come to London to treat John, who was in bad shape.

We called him up and he came over and we started primal therapy

in England, and finished it off in California.

While we were in the therapy, John started to write songs,

and most of the songs were written then.

In a nutshell, primal therapy allowed us to feel feelings continually...

and those feelings usually make you crz.

Dr Janov's idea is that his patients

should have what he calls a primal experience,

that is they should relive the pain of their own birth.

His theorz is that the pain of birth can have catastrophic effects

that cause lifelong tensions in the child.

By helping them retrace their experiences in carefully controlled conditions,

Dr Janov claims his patients find their way back

into their mothers' wombs.

I think his whole album is just an assault on the senses

in the sense that it's just raw.

I mean, "Mother, I had you, you never had me."

He was always talking about his mother and how he regretted the fact that

she didn't get to see him become so successful.

I was raised by my auntie. My father and mother split when I was about four.

He was a merchant seaman. You can imagine, it was 1940s, in the war.

He left, and I was brought up by an auntie.

And then when I was 16, I re-established a relationship with my mother

for about four years, she taught me music.

She first of all taught me the banjo, and I progressed to guitar.

The first song I learned was Ain't That A Shame by Fats Domino,

and then she was run over by an off-duty policeman who was drunk at the time.

He had an enormous amount of pain.

I've seen an awful lot, and I don't think I've ever seen the equal.

It was a terrible thing and also a good thing because it just drove him.

The fact that he has to get this song out of his system

means he has to scream, if it's a song where he has despair.

Yoko had some influence on his screaming

and getting the best out of his screams that she could.

John would come in

at the end of each session, he'd have a go at the vocal on Mother.

I'd have to drop in at that point and he would go for the vocal.

It was really raw on his voice, he'd do the screaming,

and it'd always have to be at the end of the night

because after that he couldn't do anYthing, he'd lose his voice.

And there's the incredible screams.

We can hear it soloed.

Wonderful.

It's one of the highlights of the record,

and no one had ever really sang like this before, especially a Beatle,

sort of let rip like that.

The looseness of the singing was developing on Cold Turkey

from my experience of Yoko's singing.

She does not inhibit her throat.

It was verz important to him that he actually does put what he's writing in a song

into the way he's singing it. That's what makes a good singer.

If it's Dylan or if it's John or if it's anybody,

that's how a good singer has to sing.

The simplicity of what Klaus and I played with him,

gave him a great opportunity to actually for the first time

really use his voice how he...

and his emotion how he could. There was no battle going on.

John's voice was everything,

and he...

he communicates with his voice everything that he wants to communicate.

It was only me, John and Ringo,

and when we heard the songs,

we didn't start fiddling about

and doing, "We are only three people, now we have to play a lot." No.

Simplicity.

Klaus.

Hello, Klaus - playing chords.

Verz good, Klaus.

That's quite ingenious, really.

"Hold on now," you know.

We might have a cup of tea

or we might get a moment's happiness any minute now.

So that's what it's all about, you know,

just moment by moment, that's how we're living now,

but really living like that,

and cherishing each day,

and dreading it too, you know - it might be your last.

It sounds funny, but you might get run over by a car.

I'm really beginning to cherish it when I'm cherishing it.

This is John and his experience,

And we felt that experience,

and we put that experience in our way onto the tape.

He would just sit there and sing them

and we would just sort of jam

and then we'd find out how they would sort of go,

and we did them, and it was very loose, actually.

And it being a trio also was a lot of fun.

We actually were live in the studio,

and the atmosphere of those people being together in the studio

comes on the record, you can feel it, it is a difference.

It kind of emphasises my view on life

that you should do a song with somebody singing along with it at the time.

All of these were done with John singing.

We didn't necessarily keep the vocal,

but it gave everybody an idea of what the song was all about.

If we can get in a mood together over a couple of days,

I wanna do them all like this, if I can just get relaxed and maybe sing it all right.

We'll try this one now. So you can practise chords.

- Which one is that? - The D one now.

I'm just gonna go where me mood takes.

I can play the piano even worse than I play guitar.

So that's a limited palette, as they call it.

And so I surprise meself.

I have to think in terms of, "Go from C to A,"

and I'm not quite sure where I am half the time.

John just learned to play the piano,

and he picks three notes, and it's just a little leading note on the left hand,

and it's just beautiful, the way he does it,

and this is the way to write songs.

If somebody can do that, he can do anything.

The alienation started was when I met Yoko,

and people do not seem to like people getting a divorce.

It's all right to do it quietly, but we can't do it quietly.

So we fell in love, and it's unfortunate, we fell in love and we married.

A lot of people sort of think that to be odd,

but it happens all the time

and Yoko just happened to be Japanese, which didn't help much.

We get a lot of race letters.

Well, there are crackpots who do that to everybody.

"Why did you marry a Jap?" You know, things like that.

"She'll stab you in the night."

"Just like they did in the war."

- Somebody sent me a doll. - Look what we did to them in the war.

A rubber doll with lots of pins stuck on it.

John and Yoko took an awful lot of criticism in the late '60s for what they were doing,

and they were a kind of running news story for Fleet Street.

They were a gift, really, to the newspapers,

especially the middle-aged newspapermen editors

to whom it was shocking

that they were doing things entertainers weren't supposed to do -

advocating peace, for instance.

I was mainly on this record a timekeeper.

You know, it's very straight, very few fills.

There's a few lifting the track occasionally,

but the basic job on this record was just holding it down

wherever John wanted to take it.

People are supposed to listen to the words, listen to the song,

and get into the feel of this.

In my mind, I had this thing about the fact that his voice...

He didn't need anything else, just the voice.

So this is just John's double-tracked vocal.

On this section, it goes John either side.

And then at the end, they come in together in the centre.

Great. So good.

Since John met Yoko, things were going up for John, definitely.

He was very lost.

I had several experiences with him

where he was very down and didn't want to live,

you know, he didn't have much joy in life,

and he didn't know where he was going, what he was doing.

He was famous and everything, but still, that man was very unhappy,

and Yoko really was the start for him getting better and better.

Yoko's influence upon John

on every level of the relationship,

especially musically,

is evident in each and every one of these songs.

I was the wind.

Whenever I noticed something,

he used to say, "Just whisper to me."

So there was a lot of whispering going on.

She played the atmosphere.

She has a musical ear and she can produce rock and roll.

She can produce me, which she did for some of the tracks.

I'm not gonna start saying, "She did this and he did that,"

but when Phil couldn't come at first...

From what I understand, Phil Spector was invited to be part of this album all along,

but, having heard the tapes and seen the recording sheets,

it's quite clear that most of the album was done without Phil Spector,

which may be a surprise to some, it was to me.

John took out an ad in Billboard

at the beginning of October 1970, after the album had begun,

basically saying, "Where are you? I've started, come and join the fun."

If we had a producer, he'd say, "Carry on."

But we can't find that drunken junkie.

I have no real memory of Phil producing this record at all.

I remember he came in later...

but I never felt Phil was like, "Oh, he produced this record."

The engineer took down what we did, and then John would mix it.

Isolation and Hold On John, they're the rough remixes.

I just remixed them that night on 71/2

to take them home to listen to them, like Instant Karma and other things.

This is still before Phil came, but the idea, if you remix it right away -

I'd known that before but never followed it through -

it worked on every one that I did like that.

I just remixed them the same night - Hold On John, Isolation

and I Found Out.

Like when you were saying,

"Boy, you're gonna carry that weight for a long time."

That's Paul sang that, but that belongs to all of us, he's singing about all of us.

We've all got to carry it till we die.

You weren't thinking of anyone in particular?

How could I be? How could I be thinking of you?

I don't care me, but just all... It's all somebody.

I'm thinking about me, or at best Yoko, if it's a love song.

But that's it. I'm basically singing about me.

I'm saying, "I had a good shit today and this is what I thought this morning,

"and I love you, Yoko," or whatever.

I'm singing about me and my life,

and if it's relevant for other people's lives, that's all right.

John was always full of enthusiasms.

He was always searching for some kind of answer, or solution,

or something that would bring him peace, the world peace,

and he went through enormous numbers of ideas and philosophies

and ideologies and fads.

One minute it was macrobiotic foods, the next minute it was going in bags,

the next minute it was Buddhism, the next minute it was Hare Krishna,

the next minute it was... you name it.

You know, politics, this group, that thing, Phil Spector,

and he'd go through them, he'd eat it up, get really over the top about it,

and then kind of...

discover that it wasn't all what it was cracked up to be,

maybe retain some of it, and kind of reject it

and move on to the next thing.

He had a solid core of hostility and anger

and cynicism and scepticism,

and that kept all the nonsense away.

If somebody's gonna impress me, whether it be a Maharishi or a Janov,

then there comes a point where the emperor has no clothes.

They have to have a deep and clear experience of being.

So, for all you folks who think that I'm having the wool pulled over my eyes,

well, that's an insult to me.

That's one of his famous breaks there.

Great drums on I Found Out.

That's where they sort of come up a notch there.

If I get a thing going, Ringo knows where to go... like that,

and he does what...

We've played together so long that it fits.

That's how it felt we should go,

and so, you know, I brought in the toms a bit more there.

I always loved Ringo's playing,

and lots of people in America,

all the drummers I know, great drummers,

if it's Jim Keltner or Bill Cobham, those fantastic technicians,

fantastic drummers, they all love Ringo,

because Ringo has taste,

those little fills he's doing, so sparse and so to the point.

The track is what we're playing for,

and Klaus is behind the track as well,

he's not there to show off.

We're doing the best we can for the overall emotion of the piece.

I think that some people thought of Ringo as a sort of...

a normal drummer, but, you know,

when you listen to something like Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band...

I was so amazed that he could just go on like that,

following up right away, and right to the point, it was really good.

Her record was a lot of fun because it was like a jam,

and then she would do her crazy singing on top of it.

It was one of those thing that just happened.

We started Why without her, she was in the control box,

it was meant to be my session, and we got into such a good lick,

and on the beginning of the track, I said, "Hey, hey!"

I'm trying to signal her to come in and start

because it was right for her to sing with it, but she didn't hear me,

she wandered in because she was inspired by the sound,

and she just came in and grabbed a mic.

John would sort of be the lead musically, and we would play,

and then Yoko would do her...

Peace and love, Yoko.

It was the first real rock-and-roll take we ever did together

and it's Ringo, Klaus, me on guitar, and Yoko on voice,

and the fascinating thing is, even we didn't know where Yoko's voice started

and where my guitar ended on the intro, but you can tell.

John kept wanting to create a relationship

between my album and his album

to show to the world that we did it together, kind of thing.

So, he said, "How about mine called Primal

"and Yoko's called Scream?" Primal, Scream.

But finally he managed to have a cover

of both of us sitting under a beautiful tree in our garden,

and one, John is sitting like this and I'm leaning on him,

and the other, I'm sitting and John's leaning on me,

and that's the only difference.

It's a fascinating record, because it's totally unlike anything else,

well ahead of its time,

and sometimes I dig it out and play it to bands that I work with today,

and they're really impressed,

it's like, "Wow, how did you do that?"

We were just becoming stark-naked real.

Not naked necessarily, but real.

And so, mine was very real,

and John was real in a different way,

but we both kind of exposed ourselves.

We all had our wives and our families,

and we'd go to work and come back, and they'd say, "How was your day?"

"It was fine, we did a couple of tracks."

Then suddenly Yoko was living in the studio with us,

it freaked us out, freaked me out, anyway.

And I asked him, "What is going on?"

He says, "We're gonna spend every minute together."

So as soon as you knew that, you were cool,

and that's what they did.

There's nothing more important than our relationship, nothing,

and we dig being together all the time,

and both of us could survive apart, but what for?

I'm not gonna sacrifice love,

real love,

for any fucking whore or any friend,

or any business,

because in the end, you're alone at night,

and neither of us wanna be.

So this is just the guitar and vocal on its own.

Very tender.

Lennon's singing on that, I think is...

His singing throughout the album is very beautiful.

There's great attention to texture and phrasing,

particularly on Love, which is clearly a very heartfelt song.

It speaks of his devotion

to this extraordinary woman

who had divided the world.

In the interview that I did with him,

he talked a lot about how he and Yoko,

particularly Yoko, had been treated as...

her as a second-class citizen, as a woman, as an Asian,

and I think probably a lot of that's true

but I also think that there was a desire to blame her

for what he himself wanted to do, which was get out of the band

and go his own way and grow up

and get away from this teenage thing that he'd been involved in all his life.

Hey, come on, you were doing that!

His 30th birthday occurs during the making of the album,

and 30 was a landmark that he himself had put down,

he used to say, "I don't wanna be fiddling around the world

"playing She Loves You when I'm 30."

Well, he's 30 now, and She Loves You is back there somewhere,

and he's moved on, and he's moving away from Abbey Road

and it's very much the end of an era now.

We were both very political people, in our conversation,

and I think it was very exciting for me that I'm actually...

married to a working-class person, a working-class hero.

I didn't even reaIise there were two untiI somebody pointed it out.

I mean, you do say ''fucking crazy'', don't you? That's how I speak.

And it was just... I was very near to it many times in the past,

but I wouId deIiberateIy not put it in, which is the reaI hypocrisy,

the reaI stupidity -

I wouId deIiberateIy not say things because it might upset somebody

or whatever I was frightened of.

EMI, the record company, were uncomfortabIe

with the fact that they had a piece of product that had swearing on it.

For a whiIe, they considered bIeeping it,

then they Iet it go, but they did say to John

that he couIdn't have the Iyric printed in fuII on the sIeeve.

So, being a pragmatist, which he was,

he thought, ''I want my record to get out there,

''I'II asterisk the swear words out,''

but he made EMI own the asterisks,

he made them say, ''Omitted at the insistence of EMI.''

I think it's for the peopIe Iike me who are working cIass,

whatever the...upper or Iower,

who are supposed to be processed into...

into the middIe cIasses, you know,

or into...through the machinery, that's aII.

This is my experience, and I hope it's just a warning to peopIe.

I think it was a very honest and rather beautifuI attempt

to express regret at something that he'd Iost or perhaps never had,

at a certain kind of honesty that he couIdn't aspire to, even,

because of who he was and what had happened to him.

One has to compIeteIy humiIiate oneseIf

to be what the BeatIes were, and that's what I resent.

Once he decided that he was going to

get off that boat of the BeatIes, so to speak,

I think he just became very reaI.

You're born in pain, and pain is what we're in most of the time,

and I think that the bigger the pain, the more gods we need.

God is an amazing song.

''God is a concept by which we measure our pain,''

is a very profound thought.

He rented a house in BeI Air, which is a very ritzy area here,

and we taIked about things,

and he said, ''What about God?''

and I wouId go on and on about God as...

peopIe who have deep pain generaIIy tend to beIieve in God with a feevency,

and he said, ''You mean God is a concept by which we measure our pain.''

I'd go aII around it, and he wouId just...Iike that.

And that was John. John couId take very profound phiIosophic concepts

and make it simpIe.

Isn't that an incredibIe track?

And BiIIy Preston never put his hands in the wrong pIace. Never.

And I've known him since he was 16.

One of the few musicians who never put his hand in the wrong pIace.

He was on Let It Be and they got on reaI weII.

BiIIy Ioved the band and they Ioved BiIIy.

John actuaIIy said, ''Come on, BiIIy, do a IittIe of your gospeI piano,

''it's about God.''

He inspired him to do something about his...

That's his upbringing, BiIIy Iearned piano pIaying

and organ pIaying in church,

and he reaIIy beIieved in God,

and that's the way he pIays on this song.

It's beautifuI.

It's interesting just hearing the two sounds of the pianos.

One is a normaI cIassicaI piano, a Steinway piano,

which BiIIy Preston pIayed,

and then we've got the honky-tonk piano,

which is simpIer pIaying, just a rhythm piano,

which is what John pIayed.

Both Steinway pianos, but just a totaIIy different sound.

Just soIo the drums here, just to give you...

Just interesting just hearing these...

And the fact... Each one of these toms, tom fiIIs,

are aII different.

I've never done a fiII the same twice...

cos when I do it, it's what...

it's where I'm at at that moment, you know.

And so if you wanna then re-record that track,

I'II do a fiII in that space but it won't be the same.

You know, my way of drumming, yeah, I can keep time,

but the fiII, which I aIways feeI is my art,

is it has to do with the surrounding atmosphere at that moment.

LittIe by IittIe, aII of the veiIs were being puIIed away,

aII of the idoIatry, aII the peopIe he feIt were just incredibIe,

and you reaIise, when aII is said and done, you onIy have yourseIf,

and that's just the truth, and he came to that concIusion very quickIy in therapy.

It's Iike I no Ionger beIieve in myth, and BeatIes is another myth.

PeopIe reaIIy did think the Mop Tops,

the Fab Four were going to Iast forever.

It was shocking. ''I don't beIieve in the BeatIes.''

Said that in print in RoIIing Stone and on that aIbum.

It was a very big thing with John,

he was going through a hard, heavy time of finding himseIf,

dispeIIing a Iot of his chiIdhood

and putting it into a reaI space,

you know, and searching, Iike the rest of us,

for the meaning of Iife, as Monty Python said.

So, you know, it didn't...

For me, I pIay drums, OK?

And if he wants a search, I'II pIay with you. That's how it was.

The dream's over, Iike, it's over, and we've got to...

weII, I have, anyway, personaIIy, got to get down to so-caIIed reaIity.

That's Iike one of the key Iines in that record -

''The dream is over.''

The PIastic Ono Band LP is the extreme

because you reaIIy have John just taIking the way he feeIs.

He was aIways brave,

he wouId put it out there,

and the consequences sometimes were very harsh,

but he wouId aIways put it out there,

that's why you couId not not Iove him.

It's John Lennon at his most pure,

and we've Iost him.

We Iost him in 1980

and we don't know what we wouId have got, had he Iived,

but we know what he gave us when he was aIive

and this record is just so incredibIy personaI.

It was the biggest statement he couId make. There are no compromises in it.

There are some beautifuI things

but they're not the resuIt of wanting to make something pretty.

The onIy thing in the worId that Iasts

is that which is reaI.

PIastic Ono Band was reaI.

He was naked in front of his fame.

Just straight nakedness.

And it was right there, aII the time, and he had to deaI with it.

Some peopIe deaI with it by drink, and this and that,

he got with it by writing songs,

IuckiIy for aII of us.

It was a revoIution for a BeatIe to do this, I suppose,

to say, ''Listen, I'm human. I'm reaI.''

I think it took a Iot of courage for him to do it.

I wouIdn't Iike to be inteeviewed on a Iot of records...

but this, I don't mind, cos it's a beautifuI record and he was a beautifuI man

and I'm priviIeged to feeI he was my friend.

This is the song Remember and it's a very simpIe song.

John pIayed piano with the guide vocaI,

which isn't there any more,

but I'II just pIay the basics of it.

LittIe bit of reverb. We had a bit of reverb on that.

Just to here.

And the drums are Iike Ringo just pIaying aImost Iike a drum Ioop.

It sounds aImost Iike a Ioop, the same aII the way through apart from the bridge.

Very soIid.

And the bass very, very simpIe too.

And one.

Tape echo on the vocaI.

I mean, it's sort of interesting how as a song it aII works.

And the actuaI individuaI pieces are quite basic and quite pIain.

There's an interesting section coming up now, the bridge where the drums change.

And it becomes quite BeatIey, there's quite a BeatIey feeI to it.

EspeciaIIy with the bass that comes in here.

And aIso on that section John overdubbed the harmony.

There again it's quite BeatIey.

WeII, there's aIso a coupIe of interesting things that I don't remember.

And...

There's two tracks of jaws harp.

Not quite sure who pIayed it, whose idea, who we can bIame for it,

but there's...

Maybe it was PhiI's idea. Let's bIame PhiI.

But anyway, they weren't used.

In fact one of them got wiped to put the vocaI harmony on,

so it was obviousIy...

somebody's idea.

OK. Stop.

OK.

And I think what actuaIIy happened there, just my memory's jogged back in,

what happened, because the vocaI stops and he says,

''Remember the 5th of November,''

I think the track shouId have gone on,

I think initiaIIy the vocaIs shouId have gone on.

And then I think maybe it was John's idea to have a sort of a bomb on the end of it.

It's the day they bIew up the Houses of ParIiament.

We ceIebrate it by having bonfires every November 5th.

I just... It just was an adIib, you know.

We'd been doing... It was about the third take.

And I just... And it begins to sound Iike Frankie Laine when you're singing...

Then it was the end. I didn't know how to go...

And I just broke away and it went on for about another seven or eight minutes.

I was just adIibbing and goofing about,

but then I cut it there and just expIoded because it was a good joke.

And I thought it was just poignant that we shouId bIow up the Houses of ParIiament!

And this is just an earIier take.

Have a Iisten.

I think it's great.

This is when I enjoyed doing this aIbum because it was fun.

You can hear KIaus trying to catch up.

It's getting a bit fast. Fucking heII.

Yes, weII, in-between it was a bit too much. I used to just do...

I mean, as was typicaI back then,

you took everything and everything was a rehearsaI,

and you never knew where something wouId Iead.

And especiaIIy back in BeatIe times too,

you'd sort of have a song that wouId start off in one vibe,

and go into a totaIIy different direction and that was the way the song wouId end up.

And obviousIy here they started way, way too fast.

Knowing how impatient he is, I thought he wouId have stopped after

two bars of it being fast, but he obviousIy was enjoying it,

or having a good time.

It's great to hear this kind of stuff, what went on.

It just reminds me of the fact that they were reaIIy fun times.

WeII, The BeatIes first met KIaus in Hamburg in 1960.

They got to Hamburg as unknowns

and within a few weeks they attracted a kind of an arty crowd.

And in particuIar, there were three friends who came down together.

There was KIaus, Astrid, who was his girIfriend,

and Jurgen, who was their friend, friends of both.

KIaus came down first, he dragged the others down.

None of them had ever seen anything Iike The BeatIes ever before.

CouIdn't beIieve their eyes, feII in Iove with them,

befriended them and kept in touch with them.

And eventuaIIy in about '64,

KIaus came to EngIand.

And he Iived with Ringo and George for a whiIe.

And then got settIed. Got himseIf a job, I think with an advertising agency,

started doing some work for Brian Epstein designing ads and stuff Iike that.

And then designed The BeatIes' RevoIver sIeeve.

He was a graphic designer, so this was his trade.

The RevoIver sIeeve was obviousIy a reaIIy good one.

And they aII Ioved KIaus,

so KIaus was a paI.

And...

But then he took up the bass.

I think he... I think he had Stuart SutcIiffe's oId bass,

Stuart being The BeatIes' former bass pIayer,

and he eventuaIIy joined Manfred Mann

as their bass pIayer and pIayed with them for a whiIe.

I think he pIayed with The HoIIies for a bit as weII.

He was a bass pIayer and he was a designer and he was a friend.

So when John needed a bass pIayer,

which being that he didn't want to use PauI, he needed a bass pIayer,

there was KIaus.

KIaus was a true friend and KIaus was a friend right through to the end.

One, two, a one, two, three, four.

The guitar sound is something that we search for today.

It's Nirvana, it's...

It's what aII young guitarists, you know,

Arctic Monkeys or something, you know,

this is what they're going for.

This is John doing it, you know, aII that time ago.

That's typicaI, Iike, Kurt Cobain-type sound.

Even Radiohead, you know, Radiohead wouId go for that kind of edgy thing.

It's not... It's not Iike fuII-on distortion, it's got a musicaIity to it.

The guitar sound was the NationaI wooden-bodied guitar,

but with a metaI sounding pIate,

and he was using a Fender Vibro Champ,

which is a smaII one speaker,

it's Iike a six-inch speaker, IittIe portabIe amp, reaIIy.

But you couId reaIIy crank them up, turn them up.

And here's a IittIe bit of John's vocaI again.

Now he starts again...

screaming.

I mean, how do you sing Iike that and taIk afterwards?

UnbeIievabIe.

So this is WeII WeII WeII.

It's the best version.

And there's just a IittIe thing I aIways remember that happened on the day.

And I've actuaIIy written it down here, an interruption.

It's that guitar sound again.

There was a IittIe thing.

ShaII I pIay that again?

This is just a IittIe...

For some reason we thought they were going to be stopping or something,

and Yoko reaches for the taIkback button,

and this is...

I mean, that was very good,

You see.

She just says, ''I think that was very good,'' but she comes through the studio speakers.

It's on the actuaI master, you can hear it on the record, actuaIIy.

It's just Iike in the drop-down part, where the...

Kind of before it comes back in for the ending, you know.

I don't know if you couId get rid of it. WeII, actuaIIy, Iet's find out.

We're Iistening to it on the vocaI track, but we couId have taken the vocaI out.

It's very faint there.

I think John probabIy wanted it Ieft in.

You know, he probabIy said, ''That's it.''

You know, ''Yoko's on the record.''

No one compIained, you know.

I was there when he did Working CIass Hero,

and it's two takes, actuaIIy, which are cut together.

There's a cut somewhere and I think you can hear the cut

when you reaIIy Iisten to it properIy.

PhiIip McDonaId recorded a version of it

and it's just very simpIe, it's just guitar and vocaI.

It's sort of aImost Iike a poem,

you know, the Bob DyIan kind of song.

And John came to me when I started working on the project and said,

''I've Ieft a verse out,

''and I need to record a verse and put it in.''

And I said, ''WeII, OK. Or do you want to do the whoIe song?''

He said, ''No, I don't want to do the whoIe song, I just want to do the verse.''

And Spector's saying, ''He just wants to do that.''

So what we had to do was...

try and get exactIy the same sound,

which I didn't...

do.

It was different. He was pIaying different, I think he had a different pick.

So what actuaIIy happened was when we recorded it and edited it together,

put the extra verse in, it sounded totaIIy different.

And I was a bit sort of worried about it, you know,

being an engineer you have to get everything right.

He said, ''That doesn't matter, the most important thing is that that verse gets in.''

WeII, what we actuaIIy did was,

we had the guitar and vocaI on a muIti-track tape, on two tracks of the tape.

And what we must have done was pIay that to John,

so he couId get the tempo and how it went,

and then we took that out of his headphones,

and then he sang the verse,

and then we mixed them off and edited them together.

So this is actuaIIy the chorus before the...

verse comes in. And you can get the idea.

And this is from the originaI eight-track tape,

which is now 37 years oId.

And we're quite Iucky to have this.

So this is PhiIip's verse.

And this is the one that I did.

WeII, it aImost sounds Iike a different guitar, but he promised me it wasn't at the time.

Same mics, everything was the same, we were Ied to beIieve.

It had gone by then. It was just the verse we used.

Here's where the two versions are together, just to show you what happened.

Very confusing.

And here's the edit actuaIIy on the record.

It was just him in the studio.

Just pIaying by himseIf.

BeautifuI.

WeII, at the same time as working on John's record,

and I think it just happened,

it's Iike John said, ''OK, we're gonna do Yoko's record now.''

And so I think it was aII recorded in one evening.

And it was KIaus and Ringo,

John on guitar and Yoko Iive in the studio in the booth.

And reaIIy they just jammed.

They just pIayed a fast bIues and a sIow bIues,

something in-between.

And I'd just keep running tape untiI it run out.

You know, as soon as the tape wouId run out,

I'd quickIy put on another reeI and start again.

And I guess aII the recording was done in one day.

But I think we spent, you know, maybe a week, two weeks, editing.

You know, Iisting back, choosing sections.

Adding Iots of...

There was one or two tracks where we added Iots of effects,

Iots of repeat tape echoes to make the drums aII tumbIe and things,

on her voice and things.

There was Iots of edits, you know.

In a way it was earIy days of Iooping and sampIing,

which is what you do with computers so easiIy now.

And in those days, we wouId...

I can remember after mixing the whoIe track,

which was a whoIe reeI of tape, 30 minutes,

Yoko wouId choose one section

and then another section and then another section.

And I'd have to join them together, I'd have to edit these sections together

on the beat and make them fIow.

And then sometimes she'd say, ''No, no, I want that section again,''

which wouId mean I'd have to copy it

and more or Iess Ioop it, which is what you do in computers.

I mean, nowadays, you know, a Iot of music's created that way,

and reaIIy it was the forerunner of that kind of technique,

of Iooping and sampIing.

We were kind of sampIing her voice

inasmuch as we were copying it and repeating it,

and overIaying it on top of other rhythm sections.

It was a very exciting record to do because you never knew what was happening,

you had no guideIines,

you didn't know whether it was right or wrong, or good or bad, you know.

Yoko knew, you know.

And John knew as weII. He offered Iots of encouragement aII the time, reaIIy.

And Iater on, she sang songs, she sang Iyrics.

And up untiI that time, incIuding on this record,

even Iive performance, I think before she even...

before she even met John,

she was using the same voice and the same improvisation thing.

And it was kind of... It was untreated, actuaIIy, her voice.

It was Iive as it happened.

I mean there was no speciaI effect or technique,

it was never disguised, her voice.

It's the way it came out, reaIIy.

It was fascinating, reaIIy, because, you know,

Ringo and KIaus Voormann wouId just pIay.

And there wouId be John and Yoko just going for it together, you know.

Somebody's pinched God,

God is aIive and Iiving in the EiffeI Tower,

It's interesting how this song particuIarIy started off with...

John pIaying guitar and singing it.

It ended up with piano.

It ended up being so much better with the two pianos,

with BiIIy Preston and John pIaying piano.

But it's great going back on aII these different takes

and hearing how it went from A to B to C to D,

to being the finaI, finaI master, you know.

And everything's recorded.

Quite often in these instances, this is aII done in a rehearsaI room,

and peopIe work a song out and then when they come into the studio it's aII...

it's aII finished, that's the way it is,

but going through these, you can see how we kept everything,

every IittIe tape was kept in case he wanted to hear it for a reference or something.

It's great to hear.