In an era when pop stars get involved with causes but only if there’s good PR in it for them it’s refreshing to see that John Lennon committed totally to all the causes that he truly believed in and for him in the early 1970’s in the aftermath of the break-up of The Beatles, there were many. One to One was a concert that would be his last and was inspired by an upsetting and disturbing TV documentary he and Yoko had seen about the Willowbrook State school, where hundreds of mentally and physically disabled children were held in appalling understaffed conditions that saw each child given three minutes only to be fed.
Co-directed by Sam Rice–Edwards and Oscar wining Kevin MacDonald this might seem to be scraping the barrel of Beatles related stories but this is a little known and long forgotten episode in Lennon’s life. This was long before the era of charity records and concerts really taking hold with Live Aid that preceded decades of popstars hopping on the band wagon if they could get some free PR by caterwauling along to some dreadful reworking of a classic song. Frankly they would do anything rather than put their hand in their pocket and donate money. For Lennon at this point in his life, money meant little. Having found his soul mate with Yoko One, and it’s clear from this documentary that he was deeply in love with her, he had sold up his UK mansion and its enormous grounds and chosen to emigrate to New York living in a small loft apartment like a student and had involved himself with a number of left wing activists and agitators like Jerry Rubin Allen Ginsberg and such like, all of whom had the appearance of the fire alarm having gone off mid-way through a haircut.
An almost expressionist editing style its sets the era hopping from TV commercials to Vietnam protests to coverage of President Nixon edging ever closer to the Watergate scandal. Like Billy Joel’s song, ‘We didn’t start the fire’ it’s an ongoing list of incidents and culture that makes clear the turbulent era in which John and Yoko were living. But it’s not without its laugh out loud moments that features activists protesting over the use of toilet paper to a running joke about obtaining live fly’s for one of Yoko’s art installation projects and of course there is Yoko performing one of her songs that plays like a abattoir on overtime.
Interspersed with this is the concert itself a reminder that some of Lennon’s best work were from his solo career performing Instant Karma that runs as a score to horrific news footage of Vietnam being carpet bombed and later Lennon’s profoundly moving and most personal of songs, ‘Mother’. Lennon’s arrogance is still there but One To One is also a testament to his devotion to the often unfairly maligned Yoko seemingly unable to even do a TV interview without her present.
MacDonald and Rice-Edwards have put together a terrific documentary that’s a reminder of what a phenomenal artist Lennon was tragically cut down in his prime several years later.
related feature : Beatles 64 – We talk Fab 4 & Martin Scorsese with director David Tedeschi & producer Margaret Bodde
related feature : ‘The Beatles : 8 Days a Week’ – The Touring Years – REVIEW
Here’s the One to One : John And Yoko trailer…..
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