The new issue of Uncut โ€“ in shops now and available to buy online by clicking here โ€“ follows John Lennon throughout a turbulent 1969 as he embarks on a series of wild avant-garde experiments with Yoko Ono on the way to extricating himself from The Beatles and establishing himself as a solo artist.

As well as the famous bed-ins, the naked experimental films, the avant-garde albums and the political campaigns, there is the formation of a new musical outfit, The Plastic Ono Band, hastily assembled to play the Toronto Rockโ€™Nโ€™Roll Revival festival at the invitation of Kim Fowley on September 13, 1969.

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The Plastic Ono Band bassist Klaus Voorman remembers rehearsing their set of rockโ€™nโ€™roll classics on the plane from London. โ€œWe went once through each song,โ€ Voormann tells Peter Watts. โ€œThen we got to โ€˜Cold Turkeyโ€™. I thought it was a great song and we should spend time to โ€จget the right feeling, but we didnโ€™t.โ€

Inside the venue, the band got another chance to rehearse in the dressing room, although the bass and two guitars were plugged into a single amp and they didnโ€™t have a drum kit. A nervous Lennon threw up backstage. Voormann was worried his friend was going to stain his fine white suit. โ€œOne thing hardly anybody realised is that John wasnโ€™t a frontman, that wasnโ€™t his thing,โ€ he explains. โ€œPaul was the frontman of The Beatles. John didnโ€™t know how to handle the crowd. It was wrong to play โ€˜Cold Turkeyโ€™, it was a lousy version and the crowd didnโ€™t like it. John got angry. That wasnโ€™t cool.โ€

After playing a few rock standards, โ€œYer Bluesโ€, โ€œCold Turkeyโ€ and โ€œGive Peace A Chanceโ€, the set โ€จtook an unexpected turn. โ€œI heard this feedback and thought somebody needed to turn the mic down,โ€ says drummer Alan White. โ€œBut it was Yoko, in a bag, on the floor, howling through a microphone. That was a bit of a shock and the audience were as stunned as I was. It was weird โ€“ but it was exciting too and thatโ€™s what she was into, thatโ€™s what she wanted to get over.โ€

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Voormann thinks that Onoโ€™s performance was amazing. โ€œShe was doing everything she could possibly do to let the people know that war was terrible,โ€ he says. โ€œBy the end she was croaking like a dying bird. It was heartbreaking. I really heard tanks and soldiers and people dying. At the end, John came and embraced her. You could see exactly what he saw in her. He was proud of her and loved her, and in a way he couldnโ€™t care less about the public, but in another way they were trying to spread this message.โ€

On the plane back to London, Lennon decided The Plastic Ono Band were his future now. On September โ€จ20, during a meeting at Appleโ€™s headquarters, he told Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr that he was leaving The Beatles. Ten days later, he invited Voormann and Eric Clapton to join him and Starr at Abbey Road. Lennonโ€™s post-Beatles career was to begin in earnest.

โ€œJohn said we would do โ€˜Cold Turkeyโ€™ and I was happy about that,โ€ says Voormann. โ€œWe went in the studio and John and Eric were playing lots of different riffs until we created this haunted thing.โ€ When the single was released on October 20, the credit on the green Apple label read simply โ€œJohn Lennonโ€: Lennon-McCartney was no more.

Sean Ono Lennon feels that some of his fatherโ€™s more radical interventions in 1969 were partly inspired by a deliberate attempt to break with his own weighty history: โ€œIt was a reaction to being a Beatle and being told what to wear and say. He wanted to break out the box of being a Beatle. He always had an instinct that wasnโ€™t rebellious as much as a need to escape the confines of conventional society. He was intellectually driven and wanted to figure out what the world was and who he was and what love was.โ€

You can read much more about John Lennon and Yoko Onoโ€™s 1969 in the new issue of Uncut, on sale now.

The April 2019 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK โ€“ with John Lennon on the cover. Inside, youโ€™ll find Keith Richards, Anne Briggs, Edwyn Collins, Lou Reed, Humble Pie, Robert Forster, Jenny Lewis, James Brown and much more. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best of the monthโ€™s new music, including Pond, Ex Hex, Hand Habits, Lambchop, Stephen Malkmus, Kel Assouf and Patty Griffin.