'Beatles fans believe that Yoko Ono met John Lennon at the top of a stepladder. She was working on one of her exhibitions when Lennon decided to climb the steps and say hello. It was a crucial meeting and they would later be married. For Beatles fans it was an equally crucial encounter because the Fab Four would later divorce, with Yoko getting the blame.
That stepladder encounter was commemorated at an Ono exhibition in Belfast some years ago. Her piece was no more than a ladder with an apple on top of it - a simple enough statement perhaps, but one which was far too much for at least one Belfast cynic, who couldn't resist taking a bite out of the Granny Smith. What the incident says about Belfast and/or the art of Yoko Ono is hardly for me to say. All I am saying is give Yoko a chance.
That said, with the release of her new album, Blueprint for a Sunrise, Ono is certainly asking for it again. Those who dismiss her as a banshee will find much confirmation here, and those who give her the benefit of the doubt will find much to discuss in this bizarre material. And while not entirely an album of vocalisations and screams, it is certainly hard to spot any of Ono's very conservative roots in classical music.
"I went to a school for young kids to get perfect pitch," she says. "To study harmony, composition and all that. So the first song I composed was when I was four years old. I don't remember what it was about, but it was funny because 10 years ago I went back to Japan and I met this woman who was in the class with me - and she still had the song. So, yes, I was trained classically. Later, I went a little bit on the edge, so to speak - when I started to make my own kind of music."
Born in Tokyo on February 18th 1933, Ono's upbringing couldn't have been more different from Lennon's. Her parents were very wealthy and she went to school with the sons of Emperor Hirohito, one of whom apparently took quite a shine to her. It was, however, a lonely time and she recalls having better relationships with the servants than she did with her mother, who was constantly engaged with glamorous parties in their outsize house. It was also a very strict upbringing and that same severity applied to music too. If the young Yoko was to be a musician, it meant one of two things.
"My father was into western classical music and my mother was into eastern classical music, and so I was composing in the classical tradition," she says. "I wasn't interested in pop music per se, but we're all human and we all live in the same society and all of us cherish some pop songs. In my family, playing a pop record would have been disdained, but I was doing it when nobody was there. So I did like some pop music. But I was training as an opera singer and I was not very happy with the group of people who were being trained at the same time. We were not really on the same wavelength, so I quit going to music school and began to study philosophy.
"That's how I was. I was very proud, a proud young thing. But I didn't give up music."
The family moved to New York in 1947 and, 10 years later, Ono was heavily involved in the artistic life of the city, in particular the "happenings" movement, basically alternative theatrical and musical performance. She began with a series of events in a loft in Chambers Street (John Cage used the same loft) and then, in 1961, five years before she met John Lennon, she gave a concert at Carnegie Hall. "Well, my composition teacher had said, well, if you're going to be composing what I was doing, it was better to go to New York City. He was telling me about John Cage, but it was just another name and I didn't know who he was. But then I met him and he was very good. I just kind of bumped into him actually, and we became good friends.
"When I was in Japan, my then husband, Toshi Ichiyangi, and I invited him to come to Japan and tour with us. He encouraged many composers to be very avant-garde, and the people who were making their own unique music were very encouraged by him."
In 1968, she first collaborated with John Lennon, on Unfinished Music No 1: Two Virgins, which was predictably followed by Unfinished Music No 2. The third in the trilogy appeared as The Wedding Album in 1969 and, shortly after that, Give Peace A Chance was the chant on everybody's lips. A series of recordings followed, including the Plastic Ono Band material that produced enduring hits like Happy Christmas (War Is Over). These recordings also introduced the pop audience to the notorious Ono wail. For most listeners, unused to vocalisation, it was intolerable stuff, but for the enthusiastic few it suggested that maybe Ono was picking up where people like Ornette Coleman had left off.
"Well, not really. I was doing a show and Ornette was in the audience," she says. "I said hello and he invited me to do my thing with him at the Albert Hall. So that's the connection. It was really great because I respected what he was doing and I think he liked what I was doing, and there was a big connection there. But I think the vocalisations were something that I established on my own. Well, I like to think that that's what it was. I was trying to do something original - a second-rate opera singer is not what I wanted to be.
"It really happened when I was about to do an avant-garde show in New York City in 1951 and the tape recorder inadvertently went the other way. I thought this was very interesting and so I imitated the reversed voice. I really experimented and went through the training. In other words, I trained my own voice."
There is plenty of vocalisation on Blueprint for a Sunrise and Ono claims that much of it comes from the actual voices of other women which are channelled through her.
"Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, hearing thousands of women screaming'" she says. "Other times just one woman seems to talk through me."
At this point the listener is forced to make a choice: replace the CD with Abba or just take it on faith that there must be some valid explanation for such noises.
"You're Irish!" she says. "I'm sure you must read fairy stories. And I'm sure you know there is a certain magic in the world. I'm not talking about black magic, I'm talking about magical stuff. I think that I'm tuned into a lot of voices in the world and they sometimes come into me. A song like I Want You To Remember Me was the voice of a woman which was insisting to come out. It was amazing."
Now we're back to the apple on top of the ladder again. For any avant-garde artist, both respect and disrespect are inevitable, with the latter arriving in greater quantities. We either accept what they do or we simply laugh it off as that peckish Belfast cynic did some years ago. But Ono is not for changing. That clash of New York avant-garde art world and cruel Irish wit is nothing new to Yoko - she was married to an Irishman after all.
"Though John was half-English, he was devout about being Irish. He kept announcing to the world that he was Irish. Together we made a song called Sunday Bloody Sunday, and of course he thought of that one. I just joined in. He had an interest in traditional music but also in avant-garde, classical, Asian, all different kinds of music. But when he made music there were incredible Irish roots there. You can see that. He wasn't making Indian music, let's put it that way. He was a devout Irishman."
Blueprint for a Sunrise by Yoko Ono is on Capitol