IMAGINE MEETING LENNON...

Ray Connolly, the writer who knew the Beatles best, recalls the day John played him his most famous song

John Lennon tricked me when he first played Imagine to me. I was at his Tittenhurst Park estate in Berkshire one Saturday afternoon in 1971, when he told me he wanted me to hear his new single.

Taking me into his and Yoko’s bedroom, where you always went for a private conversation, he pulled out an old Dansette record player – because he couldn’t get his new hi-fi system to work – and put the pickup down on an unlabelled disc.

The first song he played was Gimme Some Truth and I was disappointed. It sounded like a wordy rant, that was thin on melody, and unlikely to be the hit I knew he wanted. So, when it was finished, I asked him what was on the flip side. At which point he turned the record over and played me Imagine.

I was puzzled. ‘Shouldn’t that be on the A-side,’ I wanted to know. He smiled. Of course, he knew very well that it would be the A-side and the title of his new album as well. He’d been teasing me. Or maybe testing?

Whatever the reason, Imagine was John at his best, turning a slogan into a song and an enduring source for newspaper headline writers. A few years earlier the slogan had been All You Need Is Love, and, after that, Give Peace A Chance. But this was better than those. In Imagine he’d come up with a non-religious anthem of brotherly love that promoted hope for a time without religious, political or wealth differences between people.

‘Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try,’ he sang in the first of a litany of peace-making suggestions that would not only touch a worldwide nerve in those days of the war in Vietnam, but would have an enduring after-life.

Sung in ceremonies at least three Olympic Games and at countless anti-war demonstrations, it was played in the film The Killing Fields, and has been recorded by more than 200 artists including Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga. In most recent memory, Imagine was played by a German pianist outside the Bataclan in Paris on the day after the murder there of 90 rock concert-goers by terrorists.

Forty-seven years on from its release, Imagine remains John Lennon’s best-known solo song.

Now the focus of a newly packaged album and book, it is also the subject of a Channel 4 film, Above Us Only Sky, that revisits the thousands of feet of film shot during its recording and includes previously unheard audio, including the first demo of Imagine, as well as footage of John and Yoko working together which has never been aired before.

That period in 1971 was a crucial one for the ex-Beatle. After breaking up the most adored rock group in the world and then having to watch as his first solo album, Plastic Ono Band, was received with smaller sales than anticipated, the new record had to be special. To achieve this, he decided to record at home. After having a recording studio built on to his house, his band – George Harrison on guitar, Nicky Hopkins on piano, Klaus Voormann on bass and Alan White on drums (Ringo was away on holiday) – came to him, and co-producer Phil Spector turned up with a stoned actor, Dennis Hopper, in tow on the first day.

With the album arranged in John’s head, recording took just a few days. The song Imagine was done on the first day. With John playing his new white Steinway piano, he sang it just three times, and the second version was chosen for release. There were other good tracks on the album. Jealous Guy became a Lennon evergreen, and country and western song Crippled Inside was fun. But nothing had the potency of Imagine.

The spark for the song emanated from a few whimsical instructions in Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit, such as ‘Imagine letting a goldfish swim across the sky’. From that, and other suggestions to imagine the impossible, her husband had gone on to fashion his anthem.

John would only ever perform Imagine twice in public. But the day after his murder in December 1980, thousands of fans sang it in mourning outside his New York home. And people are still singing it today.

John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky, tonight, 8.30pm, Channel 4. Ray’s new biography, Being John Lennon – A Restless Life, is out now.