Imagine 1971

Imagine 1971

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s political commitment resounds throughout the magnificent Imagine, Lennon’s second solo album, which offers the world a new dream—that of a world at peace. “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion—not without religion, but without this “my God is bigger than your God” thing—then it can be true.” In March 1971 Lennon wrote the album’s title song, its lyrics inspired by the Yoko Ono book Grapefruit. “In it are a lot of pieces saying imagine this, imagine that,” he remembered. “Yoko actually helped me a lot with the lyrics, but I wasn’t man enough to let her have credit for it . . . I was still full of wanting my own space after being in a room with the guys all the time, having to share everything.” Recorded in one week by the two of them, along with the legendary Phil Spector, at their Tittenhurst Park home, this last album before their American exile has over the years emerged as the great classic of Lennon’s solo career. The couple chose personal, dreamlike images to illustrate the album’s ten songs in the film Imagine. Shot throughout the summer and fall of 1971 in New York, London and Japan, Imagine was a complete change from the experimental films they had previously made. Originally intended to be shown on television when the album was released, the fi lm was designed to provide visuals for the pre-existing soundtrack. As Yoko Ono declared, they just wanted to do whatever came into their heads day by day. The spontaneity of certain improvised scenes and the surrealistic atmosphere of the sequences shot on the grounds of Tittenhurst Park imbued the film with a sure poetry echoing the album’s utopian.