Plastic Ono Band

Track	Album
Give Peace A Chance	Shaved Fish
Don’t Worry Kyoko …	Some Time In New York City
Instant Karma	Shaved Fish
Greenfield Morning …	Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
Mother	John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
Mind Train	Fly
Jealous Guy	Imagine
New York City	Some Time In New York City
The Sun Is Down	Between My Head And The Sky
Moonbeams	Take Me To The Land Of Hell

YOU are the Plastic Ono Band

On 3 July 1969, a crowd gathered at Chelsea Town Hall for the launch of the Plastic Ono Band’s first single. But the two artists behind it – John Lennon and Yoko Ono – were far away in the north of Scotland, recovering from a car crash. Meanwhile, four miles away, the remaining Beatles were finishing Carry That Weight at Abbey Road Studios. On stage that night was DJ Kenny Everett, doing his best to hold the crowd. Years before his political turn to the right when he shouted “Let’s bomb Russia” at a Tory conference, Everett was giving peace a chance.

From 1969, Lennon and Ono sometimes used Plastic Ono Band to credit their collaborations – but inconsistently. Some tracks were released under their own names, others under the Plastic Ono Band moniker. Since 2009, Ono has revived the name selectively for solo projects. So was it just a backing band? 

The short answer: no, it’s not a band in any traditional sense. The longer answer unfolds across ten songs – ten provocations, declarations, and sonic experiments that map a radical collaboration.

Plastic Ono Band was never about musical consistency or commercial polish. It was about something much more volatile: unfiltered expression, provocation as practice, and artistic equality. From its inception, it challenged the gendered norms of rock, the sacredness of The Beatles’ legacy, and the structures of celebrity itself.

Fundamentally it was about challenging an overwhelmingly male-centric model of rock music and the highly conservative values bound up with it. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 

But before we begin with those ten tracks, we need to rewind to where this all really starts: Two Virgins.

Before the Band: Two Virgins (1968)

Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins wasn’t just an album – it was an explosion. A confrontational sound collage wrapped in full-frontal nude photography, it shattered Lennon’s carefully managed Beatles persona. It merged musique concrète, domestic noise, and naked vulnerability into an act of personal and political defiance.

This was not “John’s album featuring Yoko.” Their voices, bodies, and ideas were equally central. It was a collaborative declaration, unprecedented for a rock star, and entirely in keeping with Yoko Ono’s Fluxus background – where the art wasn’t just the finished object, but the process, the gesture, the rupture with convention.

The nudity, the noise, the apparent unlistenability – these weren’t flaws. They were the point. It was Lennon’s first major step in rejecting the music industry that had created and profited from his celebrity. It was also a direct challenge to fans who resented Ono’s presence, exposing cultural prudishness, misogyny, and racism.

Together, John and Yoko released two further experimental albums. From those early recordings emerged three guiding principles that would define Plastic Ono Band:

• Unfiltered expression over polish
• Music as confrontation
• Creative equality between collaborators

As Lennon would later put it: “It was us saying, ‘Here we are, world. This is the truth – take it or fuck off.’” Most of the paying public took the latter option.

1. Give Peace A Chance (1969)

Recorded during the Montreal Bed-In for Peace, the Plastic Ono Band’s first single was a protest chant disguised as a pop single. Featuring Allen Ginsberg, Petula Clark, and a room full of activists, it was a deliberately raw recording – claps, tambourines, and an endlessly repeatable chorus.

Just like All You Need Is Love two years earlier, it proved that you didn’t need complex arrangements to make an anthem – just a simple message and a shared spirit. That spirit endured. Pete Seeger led 500,000 protesters singing it in Washington in 1969. In 2022, it played across 150 European radio stations in protest at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The slogan for the single was: YOU are the Plastic Ono Band.

It meant two things. First: this wasn’t about celebrity. You didn’t need a record deal to sing it. YOU could sing it. Second: it was music as collective art. The line between artist and audience was deliberately blurred.

The name itself originated from an idea Yoko developed in 1967: a “band” made entirely of plastic boxes and sound machines. Lennon picked up the idea and gave it a name. It captured his post-Beatles desire for something looser, stranger, more fluid. The Plastic Ono Band wasn’t a lineup – it was an identity experiment.

2. Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow) (1969)

By September 1969, The Beatles were over. Lennon and Ono accepted an invitation to perform at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival. With a band assembled on the fly – Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann, Alan White – they rehearsed on the plane.

The set included rock’n’roll covers and Ono’s searing Don’t Worry Kyoko, a primal howl of maternal grief driven by a grinding blues riff. The song referenced her custody battle with ex-husband Anthony Cox over their daughter. The song was released as the B-side to Plastic Ono Band’s second single – Cold Turkey – released in October.

The definitive version was recorded in December at the Peace for Christmas Concert for UNICEF at the London Lyceum. Alongside the Toronto players were George Harrison, Billy Preston, Keith Moon, and others. The full performance ran to 40 minutes. Yoko screamed and wailed, her voice unrelenting over feedback-drenched guitars and a Velvet Underground-style drone. Many walked out, presumably unaccustomed to hearing a Japanese woman wailing about maternal loss in a song that rejected solos and structure, just an endless tension that mirrored the singer’s unresolved grief.

Later in the 1970s other women would follow through with confrontational performances that challenged preconceptions of women in music – but in 1969 many in the audience were not ready for music that opened the door to Patti Smith and Siouxsie Sioux.

3. Instant Karma (1970)

Recorded just weeks after the Lyceum performance, Instant Karma embodies the Plastic Ono Band’s radical ethos, distilling its core ideas – raw spontaneity, anti-establishment rebellion, and music as activism – into a perfectly crafted three-minute pop anthem. 

The song was written, recorded, and mixed in under 24 hours—rejecting the lengthy studio perfectionism that The Beatles themselves had pioneered. There was a ‘Fluxus’ energy to the project, reflecting the ideas of the art movement that Ono was a key part of – the avant-garde belief that art should be immediate, not overthought.

The lineup, inevitably, was fluid – almost randomly so. Alan White and Klaus Voormann, from the Toronto band, were the rhythm section, while George Harrison was on guitar. These three, plus Lennon, were also on pianos, while Billy Preston was on Hammond and Phil Spector, who was producing the final Beatles album at the time, was in the control room. Beatles roadie Mal Evans added tubular bells, and was tasked with going to a nearby nightclub to round up people to sing on the chorus. 

It’s protest by stealth: “Why in the world are we here? / Surely not to live in pain and fear.” It wrapped collective action in gospel-pop form. The singalong chorus echoed the Plastic Ono Band’s ethos: the audience is the band.

4. Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over The City (1970)

In 1970, John Lennon and Yoko Ono underwent Primal Scream therapy with psychologist Arthur Janov. His radical method aimed to heal trauma by re-experiencing repressed childhood pain. Cut off from friends, they spent weeks dredging up memories such as Lennon’s parental abandonment and Ono’s wartime trauma, forced to wail, thrash, and vomit out suppressed rage and grief. 

There is little if any scientific evidence that the therapy works in terms of resolving underlying mental health issues, but John and Yoko underwent nearly four months of it in both England and Los Angeles. It led directly to two of the strongest albums of their joint careers. 

On its release, the album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band was reviled by virtually all the men who at the time acted as gatekeepers for rock music culture. Only Rolling Stone’s Lester Bangs described it as “beautiful … There’s something happening here.” The haunting Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over The City – from the album – is one of her most visceral compositions, merging raw grief, surreal poetry, and dissonant soundscapes to confront themes of motherhood, loss, and urban alienation. Inspired by her miscarriage, the song’s title evokes her walk through New York City while grieving. The “empty baby carriage” is a literal and symbolic void.

The track opens with a looping sample of George Harrison on sitar and Yoko’s wordless vocal wails – a psychological scream. After a minute or so, John, Ringo and Klaus Voormann drive an infectious rhythm. Finally, birdsong, street noise, and muffled voices bring field recordings into the mix – a technique borrowed from her Fluxus art.

This is not a ‘song’ in the traditional sense – it’s a public mourning ritual, forcing listeners to sit with discomfort, on an album that channels female pain in a way that was rarely voiced in rock music up to that point. 

5. Mother (1970)

Released the same day as Yoko’s album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is widely regarded as Lennon’s masterpiece. Sparsely produced (despite Phil Spector’s involvement), it was a sonic exorcism. Lennon’s voice and guitar, Ringo’s drums, Voormann’s bass – that’s it.

Mother opens with church bells and closes with primal screams. “You had me / But I never had you” remains one of the most devastating opening lines in rock. This wasn’t metaphor – it was therapy, set to tape. The sound of his raw screaming towards the end is a sound so visceral it still shocks. It turns personal trauma into a shared human anthem – anyone with family wounds hears their own story in it. This album, and the song Mother in particular, redefined what music could do: not just entertain, but exorcise demons. 

One of those who was inspired by this vision of music and ran with it throughout the 1970s was Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters in a succession of albums that culminated in The Wall: “It knocked my socks off. I don’t remember where I was, but I can remember it clear as a bell. The outro of Mother is amazing. The sonic quality on that record was like listening to [The Band’s] Music From Big Pink or something. Those records, when you listen to it and say, ‘That’s so new and fresh and different and brilliant’.”

6. Mind Train (1971)

At nearly 17 minutes long, Mind Train is a hypnotic, churning track that feels like a sonic journey through the subconscious. With funk-infused bass, off-kilter rhythms, and Yoko’s rhythmic vocal repetition, the song was ahead of its time, suggesting ideas that would be later developed by krautrock, post-punk, and industrial music.

Built on Klaus Voormann’s single, looping bassline and Ringo’s churning drumbeat, it mimics a train’s momentum. The song never peaks or resolves; it’s a trance-inducing vortex, challenging the conventions of rock music at that point. In 1971 blues structures still dominated rock music. In Britain, bands like Yes, King Crimson and ELP pulled in elements of jazz and classical music, while German bands Can, Faust and Amon Düül experimented with musique concrète and free improvisation. Yoko Ono’s album Fly, on which Mind Train appears, relates more to the German pioneers, but goes beyond a concern with musical experiment to articulate discomfort about gender, race, and power. As Yoko said: “I wasn’t making music – I was making the sound of the mind moving.”

7. Jealous Guy (1971)

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band may have been a masterpiece, but it was greeted with mixed reviews and mediocre commercial success. His next album Imagine was also credited to John Lennon Plastic Ono Band (with The Flux Fiddlers), but was a far more melodic, elaborately produced and commercial piece of work reaching number one in the UK and US. The softest song on Imagine is its most radical. Jealous Guy is Imagine’s Trojan horse: a Plastic Ono Band-style confession smuggled into a pop album that further demonstrates Lennon’s genius for turning private wounds into public art. A few years after John’s murder, Paul McCartney said the following in an interview: “He wrote ‘I’m Just a Jealous Guy’ and he said that the song was about me.”

On the surface, the song is his apology for possessive behaviour toward Yoko Ono. But the song is far better read as a confession of jealousy, guilt, and unresolved tension toward his former bandmate and collaborator, with whom he had been locked in a legal battle and war of words in the pages of Melody Maker. As Ian Leslie has written in his recent book, “The person who was the object of John’s jealousy perhaps more often, and for longer, than any other was Paul McCartney.”

In 1971, male singers didn’t sing tender apologies to other men, and rarely expressed their own vulnerabilities and flaws. The honesty and sincerity at the heart of the song is expressed further through its production. The track is sparse and beautiful – Nicky Hopkins’ piano is woven through with Voormann’s bass, supported by light strings. Lennon only ever whistled on two songs: this one, and McCartney’s Two Of Us. 

8. New York City (1972)

Moving to the city shortly after Imagine and Fly were completed, Some Time In New York City was the 1972 album that documented their lives and political passions as new residents in the Big Apple. Their most unapologetically militant work, it was a proto-punk musical newspaper. 

Songs were written to key in with events and campaigns: Attica State, Angela Davis, Bloody Sunday, etc. It was a high energy album with New York band Elephant’s Memory contributing to all the tracks, with none of the production polish of Imagine. Significantly, this was a collaborative album credited to John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with Elephant’s Memory and the Invisible Strings. Yoko’s songs had equal prominence to John’s, and the two delivered some together. The idea had a lot going for it. Sadly, it was a critical and commercial disaster. The album lacked the subtlety, imagery and melodic brilliance that made Lennon such an iconic songwriter, and Ono’s sense of radical experimentation was strangely missing. Clichés and slogans took prominence over wordplay and poetry.

But one song at least works. New York City chronicles their fugitive year dodging Nixon’s deportation efforts, crashing with radicals and embracing the city’s underground. Like The Ballad Of John And Yoko this wasn’t poetry – but it was a very fine punk zine set to Chuck Berry riffs. Lennon’s singing and guitar work are exemplary, supported by a boogie-woogie piano, and Elephant’s Memory’s garage-band rocking. The song is personal, fast, tight with just a hint of The Clash’s London Calling. 

Between 1972 and 1975, both Lennon and Ono continued to release albums – but none bore the Plastic Ono Band name. What followed was Lennon’s so-called ‘lost weekend’: a period of separation, hazy excess, and eventual domestic renewal. Parenthood and self-imposed silence replaced politics and provocation. Then, in 1980, the pair returned with Double Fantasy—a tender, polished joint album that seemed to mark a new chapter. It also turned out to be an ending. Lennon was murdered weeks after its release, and the Plastic Ono Band name seemed laid to rest. Until 2009.

9. The Sun is Down (2009)

In 2009, Yoko Ono revived the Plastic Ono Band name. At her son Sean’s suggestion, they assembled a new version: a collective that included Sean, Cornelius, and Yuka Honda.

Updated for a new era, her Plastic Ono Band album Between My Head And The Sky mixed musical experimentation with modern production methods. The Sun Is Down is a pulsating disco-techno track that channels the spirit of early Plastic Ono Band – restless, experimental, inclusive—but in a new sonic language. The vision had evolved, but the core remained: freedom, invention, and shared identity.

10. Moonbeams (2013)

On Take Me To The Land Of Hell, the final Plastic Ono Band album, Yoko Ono is 80 years old – and still howling. As always, political and personal, it features musical experimentation and a range of collaborators that include, along with Sean Lennon, Ad-Rock (former Beastie Boys), tUnE-yArDs, Shahzad Ismaily (Ceramic Dog) and Lenny Kravitz. Featuring some songs that dealt with war and climate change, the album had some echoes with Ono and Lennon’s activist period in New York. 

The album’s opening song – Moonbeams – begins with bird song and a two minute spoken piece about creation. When we get to the line “People are planets, their souls are suns, orbiting the dancefloor of a cosmic club” the bass kicks in and Ono screams and howls over the band. This is the sound of an artist still at the top of her creative game, still challenging, still brilliantly pushing boundaries.

Legacy

The Plastic Ono Band name endured because its core ideals – freedom, collaboration, and confrontation – never expired. Yoko’s revival demonstrates that the concept wasn’t tied to the 1970s but remains a living, evolving manifesto.

The Plastic Ono Band was revolutionary in how it blended rock, experimental music, and activism. Through Lennon, it gave birth to intensely personal and political rock songs. Through Yoko Ono, it introduced avant-garde techniques that influenced punk, noise, electronic and dance music.

Their impact can be heard in everything from Pink Floyd to post-punk bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees and artists like Björk. Their willingness to challenge convention, break taboos, and explore personal pain made them one of the most important and influential projects in modern music.

YOU are the Plastic Ono Band

And so am I.

JohnLennon.com

Imagine Peace – Yoko Ono

Mike Press is a music and social history writer who lives in Scotland. He is one half of the Walk on the Wild Side Soho music project.

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