‘Mind Games’ is the title track from John’s album, ‘Mind Games‘ and was released on 29 October 1973 with B-Side ‘Meat City’.

“It was originally called ‘Make Love Not War,’ but that was such a cliché that you couldn’t say it anymore, so I wrote it obscurely, but it’s all the same story. How many times can you say the same thing over and over? When this came out, in the early Seventies, everybody was starting to say the Sixties was a joke, it didn’t mean anything, those love-and-peaceniks were idiots. [Sarcastically] ‘We all have to face the reality of being nasty human beings who are born evil and everything’s gonna be lousy and rotten so boo-hoo-hoo…’ ‘We had fun in the Sixties,’ they said, ‘but the others took it away from us and spoiled it all for us.’ And I was trying to say: ‘No, just keep doin’ it.'”

– John Lennon, 1980

John: A good song, ‘Mind Games’. It was originally called ‘Make Love Not War’. It was such a cliché that you could not say it any more. So I wrote it in ‘mind guerillas’ and ‘mind games’. It’s all the same stuff and same story as ‘Imagine’ or anything else. It’s a nice track. I always liked the sound of the track.

How many times can you say the same thing over and over? When this came out, in the early Seventies, everybody was starting to say the Sixties was a joke, it didn’t mean anything, those love-and-peaceniks were idiots, [sarcastically], ‘We all have to face the reality of being nasty human beings who are born evil and everything’s gonna be lousy and rotten so boo-hoo-hoo…’

‘We had fun in the Sixties’, they said, ‘but the others took it away from us and spoiled it all for us.’ And I was trying to say, ‘No, just keep doing it!’

That was a fun track because the voice is in stereo and the seeming orchestra on it is just me playing three notes with slide guitar. And the middle eight is reggae. Trying again to explain to American musicians what reggae was in 1973 was pretty hard, but it’s basically a reggae middle- eight if you listen to it.

Trying to possess it makes it go away. Trying to possess somebody makes them go away. Every time you put your finger on it, it slips away. Every time you turn the microscope’s light on, the thing changes so you can never see what it is. As soon as you ask the question, it goes away. Peripheral vision is what it is. There’s no looking directly at it. Try to look at the sun. You go blind, right? Now that doesn’t mean you don’t have to work on it. Love is a flower, you gotta to let it grow.

The Mind Games cover is like a prediction. There is Yoko lying down like that and there is me walking away with the suitcase when we split.

So it’s apparent in the Mind Games period although it wasn’t apparent on a conscious level. I made these by hand. I planned it to be like a movement, as two frames from the movie.

You can hear the lyrics in Mind Games. I was just so confused and the song itself, ‘Mind Games’ ain’t so bad. The album is rock at different speeds. It’s not a political album, or an introspective album. Someone told me it was like Imagine with balls, which I liked a lot.

I’ve used New York musicians, apart from Jim Keltner on drums.

There’s no deep message about it. I very rarely consciously sit down and write a song with a deep message. Usually, whatever lyrics I write are about what I’ve been thinking over the past few months. I tend not to want to change an idea once it’s in my mind, even if I feel differently about it later.

We have been apart more than people think, for odd periods over the years, and now I know people are calling from England suggesting we’ve split up. It’s not so. The last time that happened was when we spent one night apart at Ascot and somebody started off rumours.

All that scares us about being apart is whether something happens to us.
Our minds are tied in together and there’s always the telephone, but one of us could have a plane crash or something. We’ve been together five years or more now, but we’ve really been together for more than ten years in most people’s terms.

Her output and energy is so much greater than mine that I just let her get on with things.

For the last ten years I’ve said that if I didn’t like something I wouldn’t put it out, but whenever I played the record back I’m thinking of ways to change it and make it better still. It’s good, but you can always do better and that’s why I go on making records.

I was disappointed at the reaction to the last album [Sometime in New York City]. Over here they banned it and made such a fuss about the songs. I know it was political with a capital ‘P’, but that was what I had in my bag at the time and I wasn’t just going to throw them away because they were political. Imagine did pretty well, so after that I wanted to just do one that I felt like.