I don’t want to hear ‘Yoko Ono broke up The Beatles’ ever again

John Lennon and Ono first met each other in 1966. At the time, The Beatles were in a stage of transition. The group had gone from mop-top uniformity into splintering paths that would yield their most iconic work, but it marked the subsequent growing apart that would spell the end of the group.

But somehow it wasn’t the group growing into different people, nor was it creative or business differences – it had to have been the woman hanging around. Ono was quite the sitting duck in the blame game that followed the group’s dissolution.

Ono is perceived as a wrench in the works of The Beatles unit, yet the group’s eventual demise was already set in motion by the time she showed up. Her frequent presence in the studio was dubbed by the other Beatles as ‘intrusive’, but there is little to suggest much intrusion beyond her mere presence and giving an opinion at the request of Lennon. George Harrison’s issue with Ono was that the ‘bitch’ took one of his biscuits during a studio session. Seriously. Perhaps she should have just stood behind Lennon like the other wives of The Beatles rather than side by side as equal partners.

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Often Ono is portrayed as a hanger-on, someone who was desperate for recognition and sought to hijack Lennon and the Fab Four for her own personal gain and control. But Ono was already an established, financially independent, and respected artist by the time she met Lennon. If anything, it was Lennon who would have been in thrall and eager to impress. Is it a mystery that a working-class musician from Liverpool with ambitions that far outweighed his surroundings would fall in love with someone like Ono? She would have seemed sophisticated, liberated, credible, and, rather datedly, exotic. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the appeal was.

When Ono left Japan for New York in the 1950s, she became part of the burgeoning Fluxus art movement, and became an innovator of radical feminist art. Her groundbreaking 1964 performance art work Cut Piece, in which she lays a pair of scissors in front of her and invites the audience to start cutting off her clothes, spoke much to objectification of the female body, and, as a Japanese woman living in post-war America, the Oriental body. Her life, perspective and inner self were already well established before she became involved with Lennon.

Still from a performance of Cut Piece (Image: Yoko Ono) Lennon, on the other hand, clearly needed her to grow as a person. She was made to endure heinous behaviour by his hands at the start of their romance, including domestic violence and infidelity, yet the man at the time of his death was much more mature, thoughtful, and considerate. Lennon explained how Ono was fundamental to making him a better person: “I fell in love with an independent, eloquent, outspoken, creative genius. For me, I started waking up.”

While older Beatles fans are more than happy to paint Ono with the brush of the wicked witch (a perception she cheerily poked fun at on her 2007 remix album, Yes, I’m a Witch), younger minds come across her work through absurd viral videos. A Museum of Modern Art performance of her 1961 installation work ‘Voice Piece for Soprano’ was cheekily edited on top of Katy Perry’s sugar-coated pop hit ‘Firework’ and became a viral sensation, still making its rounds as the real deal on social media to this day. A clip of Lennon playing a song while Ono breaks in with some avant-garde wailing is mockingly shared in a similar manner.

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The tone to the reaction of these videos comes across as pointing fingers and laughing, that somehow Ono is oblivious and woefully unaware of what she’s doing, that her artistic impulses are bred out of some madness ready to be belittled.

Yet there is little beyond certain circles recognising such contributions like her 1971 album Fly, a krautrock-flavoured favourite of the experimental crowd, or the Warhol-inspired political protests with Lennon that would make the couple the first celebrity activists, or even her co-writing on some of Lennon’s most beloved songs – she only received a writing credit for ‘Imagine’ in 2017, 46 years after its release, and despite Lennon’s wish for her contribution to be acknowledged before his death.

You would think the demonising myth of Ono’s role in the Beatles break-up, and the supposed control she had over Lennon during and after, would fade away as attitudes change. But no, fans, biographers and Beatles historians still put history and its consequences on her shoulders. We should be long past just accepting conventional wisdom that fails to stand up to scrutiny and finally scrub Ono of this old and tired narrative.