John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Double Fantasy Review

Published in October 2010 Exepose

If it hadn’t have been for a certain disillusioned fan armed with a gun in New York 30 years ago, John Lennon would have been celebrating his 70^th birthday on the 9^th October.  Released three weeks before his death after a five year househusband hiatus, the album Double Fantasy received some less that complimentary reviews, however many of these were retracted after his death. Part of the problem with the record was that with his new found happiness, his writing strayed away from his usual socio-political, edgy stances and towards songs written about his children and marital problems. Giving half of his album to his caterwauling and widely unpopular other half Yoko Ono didn’t help.

Often it sounds as if they were working on two different albums, Lennon’s songs drenched in rockabilly sentiment contrast heavily with her new wave and disco inspired contributions. Reportedly unhappy with the original mix of the tracks, Ono consented to a 2010 remix of Double Fantasy, and with this the album takes on new importance. Lennon’s vocals are crisper, unnecessary additional layers to the production have been removed and have instead been replaced with clips of his good natured jostling in the studio. ‘Yes, I’m Your Angel’ is a surprisingly soft contribution of Ono’s,  sounding more suited to a Disney film with its twee whistling and “tra-la-la’s” than a rock and roll album, and ‘Kiss Kiss Kiss’ sounds creepily contemporary with its catchy chorus and spoken Japanese.

   

In the remixed version, for some unexplained reason, the production team have gone backwards, replacing the quirky reggae beat of ‘Every Man Has A Woman That Loves Him’ with whirring synth, giving the impression that in any moment a beat will drop and it will become a club classic. Instead the harmonies blur into echoes and swim in no direction, the song is stolen of any climactic moment and it sounds like it belongs on a new age album with squawking dolphins and the rush of waterfalls. ‘Dear Yoko’ has a refreshingly earthy quality with the English concertina, despite once again professing his undying love for his wife, there is a horribly sad irony in the lyrics “I’ll never ever ever ever ever gonna let you go.”

Reviewing this album with the nostalgia that 30 years have given us, it has to be remembered that despite their warbling insistence of normality, Lennon and Ono with their pop art installations, joint screaming albums about primal therapy and the addition of worldwide fame were never going to be the blueprint of your average married couple, and if they wanted to spend five years away from the industry and return with an album about each other that spanned several genres, they would. Whether the album made triple platinum because of his murder or not, Double Fantasy will forever hold historical musical importance and huge significance to Lennon fans.