Tittenhurst Park: Summer 1971

In the summer of 1971 John Lennon was 30, and a pop group he had formed called the Beatles, which had known some success in the 1960s, had recently been formally dissolved in the High Court after a rancorous two-year spat.
But Lennon had not been idle in that time. He had discussed peace with the world's press from somewhere inside a number of bags and beds. He had recorded 'Give Peace a Chance' in a hotel room, and seen it taken up globally as the anthem of the peace movement. Lennon had undergone an intensive four-month primal therapy course in the company of his second wife, Yoko Ono - the fruits of which appeared on his Plastic Ono Band album. There had been music, too, or something like it. There was a record of fragments and sound effects entitled Two Virgins; an album called Life With the Lions, comprising one side of free-form live performance and another of recordings made in the baby unit at the Queen Charlotte Hospital in Hammersmith. During this period one critic understood the engineer's test signal on his preview pressing of a new Lennon recording to be a new piece of music and wrote it up as such - an easy mistake to make.What Lennon hadn't done by 1971 - unlike, for instance, his former partner, Paul McCartney - was release an internationally best-selling solo album of pop songs.
'It was like home cooking,' Ono would later say of the recording sessions at Tittenhurst Park, near Ascot, the results of which were eventually released as the album Imagine. 'We had some friends over,' she said.
In this context, it probably helps if your friends include George Harrison, the drummer Jim Keltner, the pianist Nicky Hopkins and the American producer and fabled 'Tycoon of Teen', Phil Spector.