A further worry: is she even knowable? How seriously does she want to be taken?<\/a> To approach her life and work is to enter a forcefield that will send the critic or biographer\u2019s navigation spinning, with warning lights from every instrument panel: Love! Magic! Power! Danger! Bliss! <\/p>\n Mayday, mayday.<\/p>\n Love Magic Power Danger Bliss is a strange, perplexed, and unconventional book about a famously weird (or, to author Paul Morley, avant-garde) woman who happened to become the muse to one of Britain\u2019s greatest popular artists of all time. Next to \u201cImagine\u201d, we still remember John and Yoko for promoting \u201cPeace\u201d to the world\u2019s press from their hotel bed.<\/p>\n Lennon, notoriously, once declared that he and his fellow Beatles were \u201cmore popular than Jesus\u201d. By association, Ono is also damned to fame as the Other Woman who shattered the songwriting genius of \u201cJohn & Paul\u201d. That tormented chapter, the backstory to the documentary Band on the Run, would culminate in Lennon\u2019s terrible murder just before Christmas in 1980.<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Yoko Ono performs during a charity concert at Madison Square Garden in New York on 30 August 1972 (AP)<\/p>\n Generations later, his widow, a Sixties survivor, now in extreme old age, remains both a hostage to Beatles mythology and simultaneously an icon of the 20th-century avant-garde. This once glorious movement, corrupted by the marketplace, has disintegrated into irrelevance and self-parody, but the band has rarely been more revered.<\/p>\n Ono herself, slight, mute and inscrutable, was always a mix of Delphic sibyl and a spaced-out fairy from some experimental production of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream. In Peter Jackson\u2019s brilliant TV reconstruction Get Back, she hovers like a ghost at the aftermath of a great banquet, a symbol of the years when the world was young and high with dreams of love and fame.<\/p>\n All of this is distilled into Love Magic Power Danger Bliss \u2013 but not, disappointingly, in a way that does justice to its subject, if that\u2019s even possible. Much like the avant-garde in its pomp, Morley\u2019s homage to Ono is perverse, frustrating, grandiose and enigmatic. His 70 chapters (\u201cFruition\u201d, \u201cProjection\u201d, \u201cSeparation\u201d, \u201cDematerialisation\u201d, etc) evoke concrete poetry while playing typographical games with the reader, but struggle with both narrative line and point of view.<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Ono and Lennon in New York in 1980, the year of Lennon\u2019s death (Getty)<\/p>\n Title and subtitle (Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora) hedge the author\u2019s bets. Morley never quite settles on what kind of genre he\u2019s in. Is this an avant-garde biography, a cultural history, or a \u201cmeditation\u201d (dread concept) on off-the-wall creativity? Worse, there\u2019s no guidance about \u201ckinetic\u201d Ono\u2019s role in this project, assuming she can be bothered. Is it authorised, and has she given her blessing? Why ever would we expect her to do such a thing? But it might help to know the score, especially as Morley himself finds scant sympathy for Ono\u2019s feverish decade with Lennon, or their grandstanding to the world\u2019s press.<\/p>\n From the outset, Morley\u2019s focus is exclusive: he\u2019s only concerned with Ono (and the artists with whom she consorted). He declares, grandly, that \u201cLennon will not be mentioned\u201d (actually, not true), with a gratuitous swipe at Beatlemania: \u201cWe can\u2019t let all that other business blot out the light.\u201d <\/p>\n Paul Morley strives to set the record straight on behalf of Ono \u2013 as best he can, amid a maelstrom of crazy data<\/p>\n What\u2019s left? A history of the French \u2013 and later, the American \u2013 avant-garde is what: a labour of love by an established English commentator, steeped in contemporary music, setting the record straight on behalf of Ono \u2013 as best he can, amid a maelstrom of crazy data.<\/p>\n Strangely, in some ways, there can be few critics better equipped than Morley for this mission impossible. At the outset, with a potted history of the \u201cAvant-Garde Diaspora\u201d from its 19th-century beginnings to the \u201cHappenings\u201d of the 1960s \u2013 via Dada, Duchamp, Cocteau and Satie \u2013 it seems as if his biographical instruments are in good order. But then he hits extreme turbulence. <\/p>\n It\u2019s the inconvenient truth of Ono\u2019s place in this ecstatic gallimaufry that, once she\u2019d uprooted herself from post-Hiroshima Japan, she became an obscure and marginal camp-follower. Her Opus 1 \u2013 appropriately titled \u201cSecret Piece\u201d \u2013 dates back to 1953, when she was still just an exile from her wealthy and aristocratic Japanese family, and had begun to nurture a gift for witty and enigmatic asides (\u201cLeap Before You Look\u201d is typical). Not until she meets another John does she find her mojo. <\/p>\n John Cage was the composer famous for 4\u201933\u201d<\/a>, a 1952 piece performed in the absence of deliberate sound (go figure). Inspired by Cage, and on the cusp of 1950s and 60s New York counterculture, Ono began to channel her profound alienation from postwar life into self-expression.<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Yoko Ono performs her video installation \u2018Onochord\u2019 at the Excelsior Hotel during the Venice Film Festival, on 9 September 2004 (Getty)<\/p>\n Ono soon met Marcel Duchamp, of \u201cUrinal\u201d fame; otherwise, her route to creative maturity was tortuous and agonised. She enrolled in college (Sarah Lawrence), and dated a boy who would later \u2013 seeking better luck \u2013 go with Sylvia Plath. Having dropped out, Ono arrived in New York \u201cshrouded in invisibility on secretive high alert\u201d [sic], under the spell of Cage. His 1960 variety act \u201cI\u2019ve got a secret\u201d featured a grand piano, a watering can, a rubber duck, a food mixer, and a vase of flowers. Better laughter than tears, said Cage, weathering audience derision. <\/p>\n Ono\u2019s idiosyncratic, semi-coherent quest, fuelled by hard drugs, inevitably landed in Lower Manhattan and Andy Warhol\u2019s \u201cExploding Plastic Inevitable\u201d. Describing her role in New York\u2019s avant-garde, Morley decides that her gender, her Japanese background and her untraceable personality meant that Ono \u201cnever entirely belonged to the history and legend of the obscure … performances she helped make happen\u201d. Beside Cage, Ono was also on the fringes of a musical avant-garde pioneered by Philip Glass and Steve Reich.<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Yoko Ono, 1980 (Getty)<\/p>\n Simultaneously, in London, the Beatles<\/a>, shedding their Fab Four identity, were becoming a rival pole of musical innovation, with Lennon\u2019s literary imagination, inspired by Spike Milligan and the Goons, drifting towards Carrollian wordplay. Ono, meanwhile, was also perfecting the art of sublime nonsense. When asked why what she did was art, she\u2019d reply, \u201cWell, what else could it be?\u201d Influenced by Samuel Beckett, she was now at the centre of the experimental network known as Fluxus, after Beckett\u2019s mantra \u201call\u2019s in flux\u201d.<\/p>\n While the Sixties unfolded, here and in the USA, the noise of time coalesced, in Ono\u2019s imagination, into a series of primal screams (and\/or whispers) \u2013 for \u201cfreedom\u201d, for \u201cdear life\u201d \u2013 the origins of what Morley dismisses as \u201cJohnandyoko\u201d. In 1967, after her long apprenticeship, Ono was ready to cross the Atlantic. She liked what she found. \u201cThere was a strange kind of shimmer in London,\u201d she remembers, \u201cand a very beautiful one. Once I breathed that, I thought, \u2018OK, I\u2019m here\u2019, and never looked back.\u201d<\/p>\n When Lennon turned up, clutching a late invitation, he asked the avant-gardist, whom he\u2019d hardly heard of, what it was all about. Ono, seven years his senior and oblivious to Beatlemania, had no idea who he was<\/p>\n Ono\u2019s encounter with Lennon seems pre-ordained. Morley\u2019s painstaking account of her creative journey as an offbeat Japanese performance artist meshes seamlessly with what we already know about the Beatles in their final, chaotic years as a band after the death of their manager Brian Epstein<\/a>.<\/p>\n London had become \u201cits own kind of happening\u201d with a unique counterculture star system. Ono placed an ad in the alternative broadsheet, the International Times (\u201cIntelligent-looking bottoms wanted for filming. Possessors of non-intelligent bottoms need not apply\u201d), and made her way to UFO, a new kind of club, where she grabbed a microphone and asked the crowd, many of them spaced-out on cushions, for volunteers. <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Artist Yoko Ono attends the \u2018Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971\u2019 press preview at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, on 12 May 2015 (Getty)<\/p>\n Her appeal seemed very New York, and hardly made sense, but in no time, Ono\u2019s Bottoms acquired its hard core of gawkers and thrill-seekers. Walking down the King\u2019s Road past the fashionable boutique Granny Takes a Trip, she found teenagers screeching her name. From UFO she graduated to Indica, another cutting-edge, art-mad gallery space\/bookshop favoured by a would-be metropolitan intelligentsia. It was here, on 8 November 1967, that she launched a landmark solo exhibition titled \u201cUnfinished Paintings and Objects by Yoko Ono\u201d. When Lennon turned up, clutching a late invitation, he asked the avant-gardist, whom he\u2019d hardly heard of, what it was all about. Ono, seven years his senior and oblivious to Beatlemania, had no idea who he was. <\/p>\n Inscrutable as ever, she handed him a card that said, \u201cBreathe\u201d.<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n \u2018Love Magic Power Danger Bliss: Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora\u2019 by Paul Morley is published by Faber (Faber and Faber)<\/p>\n Thus began the extraordinary, life-changing relationship, \u201cJohnandyoko\u201d, which Morley has already refused to anatomise. In fact, once we understand the subtle complexity of Ono\u2019s long and painful struggle to find herself as an artist, there\u2019s a case for saying that her role as mega-muse and \u201cMother\u201d to the great songwriter would become the \u201cHappening\u201d of her life, the ultimate avant-garde declaration before a global audience. <\/p>\n It was, moreover, a role that gave her no end of self-gratification; she revelled in \u201cJohnandyoko\u201d. On the evidence of Love Magic Power Danger Bliss, Morley is too austere for such admissions. His book ends on an exhausted note of anticlimax, some 30 pages of vapid incantation about \u201cYoko\u201d, \u201cwho is mistakenly never listed as a major musical influence in the standard rock histories and biographies\u201d … \u201cwho was obscured by fame\u201d … \u201cwho reached for the sky\u201d. And so on.<\/p>\n The fact that Ono and Lennon were a devoted on-off couple from 1968\/9 to 1980, with many celebrated moments of collaboration \u2013 including the birth of their son Sean<\/a>, and the composition of \u201cImagine\u201d \u2013 requires more than this. At 93, Ono has cherished her husband\u2019s legacy for close on 50 years; her afterlife as his widow has its own authenticity.<\/p>\n![\"Yoko](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Music-Lost_Albums_87976.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Ono](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1773396672_990_newFile.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Yoko](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-51278845.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Yoko](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-3072438.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Artist](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-473060208.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\u2018Love](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/9780571379248.jpg\")
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