Unreleased Lennon peace song goes up for auction

A RECORDING of an unreleased song written and performed by John Lennon is to be sold at auction in Denmark.

The Beatle played Peace Radio during a 33-minute conversation with four Danish teenagers who were interviewing him for their school newspaper.

Lennon travelled to Denmark in the winter of 1969 with Yoko Ono, in order to see her child from a former marriage.

A cassette tape of the interview is expected to fetch at least £25,000 when it is auctioned in Copenhagen on Sept 28 by Bruun Rasmussen along with 23 photographs and a copy of the school newspaper. The interview took place on January 5, 1970, at the height of the Vietnam war.

The couple talked mainly about world peace, said Karsten Hoejen, who made the recording. “Their peace message was what we came for,” Hoejen said. “There was a very cosy atmosphere. Lennon and Ono had their feet on the [coffee] table.”

The students went to meet Lennon after a newspaper reported his presence in the Danish region of Thy. “We knocked on the door and moments later we sat next to the musician and Ono,” said Mr Hoejen. Lennon played and sang Give Peace A Chance with Ono and “then they sang Radio Peace”.

The song was written for a radio station in The Netherlands but was never aired, Mr Hoejen said.

The boys eventually realised that they “were sitting on a treasure. So put the cassette in a bank vault” and debated what to do with it. As grownups they decided “a collector or a museum would get more out of it than us having it in a vault”, and they decided to sell it, Mr Hoejen said.