The Canadian music journalist Ken Zeilig met three times in 1969 and 1970 to talk to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He recorded 91 minutes of interviews on these occasions, only short excerpts of which were heard on American radio. The rest was considered lost - until the children of the journalist, who died in 1990, recently found a dozen tapes in his estate, on which not only the Beatle and his wife can be heard, but also the manager of the Fab Four, Neil Aspinall, speaks.
Partly unedited, partly edited and combined with music, the recordings provide new insights into the band's dissolution process.
The British auction house Omega Auctions, which specializes in pop memorabilia, is auctioning the original tapes along with digital copies of the recordings, transcripts, some photos and an envelope labeled by Aspinall on September 28th, estimates the value of the bundle at 20,000 to 30,000 Pound.
"I was a hypocrite"
The Guardian reports that Lennon chatted on the tapes which Beatles songs meant the most to him ("Revolution # 9", "I Am the Walrus", "Strawberry Fields Forever"), talked to Yoko Ono about their love, talked about it Influence of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and John Cages on the band's music, of the corrupting power of fame and reveal why he returned the order "Member of the Order of the British Empire": When he accepted it, he was " a hypocrite ”.