‘Imagine’ was the lead single and title track of John’s second solo album. It was written by John & Yoko and released on 11th October 1971 with B-Side ‘It’s So Hard’.

‘The song was originally inspired by Yoko’s book Grapefruit. In it are a lot of pieces saying, “imagine this, imagine that”. Yoko actually helped a lot with the lyrics, but I wasn’t man enough to let her have credit for it. I was still selfish enough and unaware enough to sort of take her contribution without acknowledging it. I was still full of wanting my own space after being in a room with the guys all the time, having to share everything.’

– John Lennon, 1980

NB: The original 1971 single was released in a plain black sleeve, the picture sleeve artworks displayed above are from a later release of ‘Imagine’, promoting the compilation album Shaved Fish with B-Side ‘Working Class Hero’, released 24th October 1975.

John: ‘Imagine’ is a song conceived in my head without melody. The first verse came to me very quickly in the form of a childlike street chant, ‘da da da da da dee dee da dee da ee a eeeh’. The piano intro I’ve had hanging around in my head for a few years – the chords and melody followed naturally from this.

The middle eight was ‘conceived’ to finish off the song. I think it works as a song. Of course, there is always room for improvement – otherwise I wouldn’t make any more. The third verse came to me in an eight-seater plane. It’s a song for children.

Yoko: ‘Cloud Piece’: ‘Imagine the clouds dripping, dig a hole in your garden to put them in.’ This is not a piece of poetry. Poetry to me is nouns or adjectives. These are verbs. And you have to do them. These are all instructions and when you just do it, then you start to understand it.

John: ‘Imagine’ was inspired by Yoko’s Grapefruit. There’s a lot of pieces in it saying like ‘Imagine this’ or ‘Imagine that’. If you get a copy of Grapefruit and look through, you’ll see where I was influenced by her. ‘Imagine’ could never have been written without her. And I know she helped on a lot of the lyrics but I wasn’t man enough to let her have credit for it. So that song was actually written by John & Yoko, but I was still selfish enough and unaware enough to take her contribution without acknowledging it. The song itself expresses what I’d learned through being with Yoko and my own feelings on it. It should really have said ‘Lennon/Ono’ on that song, because she contributed a lot of that song.

Yoko: John and I were both artists and we were living together, so we inspired each other. And the song ‘Imagine’ embodied what we believed together at the time. John and I met – he comes from the West and I come from the East – and still we are together. We have this oneness and ‘the whole world would eventually become one’ is the sense that we will all be café-au-lait colour and we will all be very happy together. All these instructions are for people for how to spend eternity, because we have lots of time.

John: If you can imagine a world of peace; if you can imagine a world with no denominations of religion – not without religion, whatever religion is – but without this divisive ‘My god is bigger than your god’ business; then if you can imagine the possibility, then it can be true.

Yoko: We all recognize that the accepted translation of Christ is ‘the anointed one’. We, however, were told that in the original Dead Sea Scrolls it is revealed that the true translation of Christ is ‘light’, which to us made more sense.

John: The light is the truth. All any of us are trying to do is precisely that: turn on the light. All the better to see you with, my dear! Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, Milarepa, and other great ones spent their time in fasting, praying, meditation, and left maps of the territory of God for all to see and follow in our own way.

The World Church called me once and wanted to say, ‘Can we use the lyrics and just change it to “Imagine one religion”?’ So that showed that they didn’t understand it at all. It would defeat the whole purpose of the song, the whole idea.

It’s one world, one people. And it’s a statement as well as a wish. We’re one world, one people whether we like it or not. We can pretend we’re divided into races and countries, and we can carry on pretending that until we stop doing it.

Yoko: Imagine all the people living life in peace. I think that that’s a very strong thing to do. It might be a very controversial thing to do, because it’s a very powerful thing to do. I think it’s all right to say that. I don’t think that goes against the policy of this country or anything like that. I think, in the end, all people in this country really want peace.

John: First of all, conceive of the idea of no nation, no passport. If you’re not defending a nation, there’s nothing to fight about. We’ve said it a million times. We’re not the first to say ‘Imagine No Countries’ or ‘Give Peace a Chance’, but we’re carrying that torch, like the Olympic torch, passing it hand to hand, to each other, to each country, to each generation… and that’s our job.

We were early pioneers of that movement to project a future where we can have goals that we can reach. Right? People project their own future. So, what we wanted to do was say, ‘Let’s imagine a nice future.’

Yoko: Our mind has a strong plasticity. If you believe that it is important for you to make the world peaceful, it will happen. Don’t start saying, ‘No. It can’t happen because….’ And list a long line of ‘No’s and ‘Never’s. It can happen and it will. We are just at the point that it will. So don’t throw negative vibes to the world.
There is enough of that.

When Christ says, ‘It’s easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than to get to heaven,’ I always took that literally to mean just his gold. That he’d have to dump the possessions to get through to Nirvana. But an intellectual has less chance of getting through than me. An intellectual with no money who doesn’t even watch TV because they’re too aesthetic and don’t want that culture coming in their house. Well, they’re possessed of ideas. And I’m no longer possessed of ideas. So those were the possessions I had to get rid of, not the physical possessions.

Most people are choked to death by concepts and ideas that they carry around with them. Usually not their own. Usually their parents’ and society’s. And those are the poss- essions you’ve got to get rid of to get through the eye of the needle and it has absolutely nothing to do with physical possessions.

Yoko: When we were making ‘Imagine’ I felt that he was an extremely sensitive musician. And he was showing that side. Not the side of ‘We’re Beatles, aren’t we?’ He was a real musician. And I respected that.

He was really very caring about the notes he was playing, the arrangement, the way it was recorded and the way it came through and all that. And I saw the kind of honest worker side of him. I loved it.

When I first heard the finished version of this song, I was in a room in Ascot in England with John and my first thoughts were that it would be a hit. The lyrics were just so beautiful. We both liked the song a lot, but we honestly didn’t realize it would turn into the powerful song it has, all over the world. We didn’t realize it would be that big. We just did it because we believed in the words and it just reflected how we were feeling.

I think ‘Imagine’ was prophetic, in a very positive way. I think it’s all right that it’s not fashionable or faddish and might seem simple.

We believed in peace. I think we were very ambitious in a sense that we wanted to see, finally, there would be world peace. I’d like to see that happen and I’d like to work my best effort for that. My feeling is that he’s part of the big force, big power out there, and he’s really helping us too.

John: I think my greatest pleasure is writing a song – words and lyrics – that will last longer than a couple of years. Songs that anybody could sing. Songs that will outlive me, probably. And that gives me my greatest pleasure. That’s where I get my kicks.

Yoko: ‘Imagine’ is a very, very powerful song. And I think it is very interesting that it is still around and still giving power to people. And I’m very happy about that.