Still imagining a better place

THE ARTS: Long defined by her relationship with John Lennon, Yoko Ono has found a new love of life in her 70s - and is committed to fighting ageism and sexism, she tells Laura Barton

She rolls across the room like a ball bearing: small and gleaming and black. Yoko Ono, at the age of 72, is as compelling and seemingly unstoppable as she ever was. Her uniform is stark black, her sunglasses huge and bug-eyed, and beneath the jaggedy black hair her face is all sharp corners. She could be 30 years younger than she is, and, as if to bolster it, her conversation is liberally strewn with the detritus of youthspeak - the "sorta likes" and "kinda things" of another generation.

Ono sits in her stiflingly hot hotel suite, the French windows thrown open on to the winsome green of Hyde Park, telling how curiously hectic her life continues to be.

"It's getting very busy since I was 70. It's very strange, but that's how it is. Well, I'm very happy about that, I'm not feeling that I'll be sitting in the kitchen."

Last Friday, she performed in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the Meltdown festival, curated by Patti Smith. Are she and Smith friends? "Patti?" she wonders, in a Breathless Mahoney sort of way. "Well, I know her from way back, of course. We're both very involved people, in sort of like 'involved in ourselves' kinda way, so it wasn't like chatty-chatty friends. But we kinda liked each other. And in 1974 we were on the same stage - she was reciting poetry and I was doing something. That was with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs kind of thing." And what did she read? "Oh," she says, "I didn't read. I introduced three of my poems and one was just I rang the bell, you know, three times, and I said, 'I'm gonna ring the bell three times and after that, immediately you think of what you wanna wish and wish it'. And that was a poem in a way."

This is the problem with Ono. Her refusal to submit to the conventional roles of poet, artist, wife, widow, has meant she has spent almost 40 years as a subject for public disdain: today she serves as shorthand for splitting up The Beatles, is still mocked for her avant garde artwork and her perceived whimsicalities - world peace, bed-ins, bell-ringing wishing-poems.

She fell into the public consciousness in 1968, as a fly in the perfect pink ointment of The Beatles, when John Lennon left his childhood sweetheart Cynthia and their son Julian to be with the Japanese conceptual artist who was seven years his senior and seemed to have appeared out of thin air. "Yeah, I came from nowhere, I came from Mars," she laughs. In fact, she came from Tokyo, where she was born in February 1933. Ono's father was a banker, and when she was in her teens she moved with her mother to the US.

She still lives in New York, in the same apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side that she shared with Lennon, and outside which he was shot dead by Mark Chapman, but where, nevertheless, she has defiantly remained to spend her days dealing with matters concerning his estate and continuing her work as a musician and artist. All of her work, her campaigning, her thinking, is laced with this same defiance: an unwilting, almost angry optimism, which she admits she has worked hard to cultivate.

"I was a very depressed person," she explains, "and I was panicking about everything, and I was scared about things and I was very vulnerable. And in order to compensate for that I went for optimism." The depression, she says, was rooted in the isolation she felt growing up, when she was popular with her peers, "but at the same time I felt that I had a world in me that I couldn't share".

"And so that was the loneliness - the loneliness was created because of that. So all my life I was feeling a touch lonely until I met John. And of course John was like that, too." They met at the Indica gallery in London in 1966, when she handed Lennon a card that said, simply, "breathe" and invited him to participate in a piece of artwork by paying five shillings to hammer a nail into a piece of wood. He responded with an offer of his own: "Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." As Lennon would later tell it: "That's when we really met. That's when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it." It would be two years before Lennon left Cynthia, and, during that time, he and Ono had only intermittent contact; she would send him cards saying "dance" or "watch for me in the sky". He, meanwhile, kept by his bed a copy of her book, Grapefruit. "Imagine a raindrop," it read, "imagine the clouds dripping." Those two years of heartfelt imagining would ultimately spawn the lyrics to Lennon's song Imagine.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Ono was a key figure in the Fluxus movement, which was characterised by its dedication to the intangible rather than specifics, and, perhaps as a result, to interview her is often to be met with replies that are rarely specific or anecdotal, but are instead broad statements about energy and positivity and radical social philosophies.

Ono says the roots of her artistic thinking lie in her early schooling in Japan: "When I was four years old, my mother put me into a school for early music education where you get perfect pitch and harmony and composition," she explains. "And while I was in this school there was a homework, which was very strange: it was 'just listen to all the sounds and noise that day in real life and try to translate that into musical notes'. So when I was at Sarah Lawrence [ the New York visual arts-oriented college where she studied] I just listened whenever I woke up in the morning to the beautiful, beautiful bird sounds all over the garden . . . and I wanted to translate that into musical notes. And I realised that my knowledge of musical notes was limited, or the musical notes were too limited to express such a beautiful music that the bird was creating. So that's when I thought, instead of trying to translate it into musical notes, which is like making it less exciting, just have it as an instruction to listen to the birds singing at eight o'clock in the morning."

Last year, she memorably caused something of a furore in Liverpool with an exhibition entitled My Mummy Was Beautiful, with an image showing a woman's naked breasts and vagina which was displayed on posters across the city. "I wasn't trying to insult Liverpool," she says. "In fact, when I thought of the idea and I visualised this beautiful mom's breasts and vagina all around the city I thought, 'Ah, it would be so beautiful', and it's like giving them love, because we are all born from [ our] mother's body, and that's the first thing that we were nurtured by - mothers' breasts."

Why, then, does she think that some people saw the exhibition as borderline pornographic? "Somehow people try to inhibit that memory," she sighs. "Women are put in a position of feeling embarrassed about their bodies. It's so ridiculous, but also astounding - we have to always be apologetic about having created the human race."

Battling chauvinism and celebrating women has been one of Ono's presiding campaigns, particularly in songs such as Woman is the Nigger of the World, Men, Men, Men and Woman Power, in which she sings: "Did you have to cook the meals?/Did you have to knit?/Did you have to care for life instead of killing?/ There's no mistake about it, sisters/We women have the power to change the world."

She is, she says, now working on a new record, an extension in theme of her last, 2001's Blueprint for Sunrise, which was concerned with "pure feminism". She says: "It was about women, and what a woman goes through. There's many women now who think, 'Surely we don't need feminism anymore, we're all liberated and society's accepting us as we are'. Which is just hogwash. It's not true at all." The jaw juts a little higher.

"You know, one out of four women who go to the emergency ward are there because of domestic violence - I mean that's in America, so you can imagine how difficult it is forwomen in third-world countries." How, one wonders, did feminism come to be such a dirty word? "I think most women would like to forget about it and just have babies and maybe stretch their faces or something," she laughs sharply.

"Society goes through phases, like breathing - breathing in, breathing out - I think there was a time when we, women, became a little bit freer and then we got scared. We got scared of being in a position of being ostracised, I suppose." And yet the undeniable contradiction is that Ono is a woman who has been defined by her relationship with a man - first by her marriage to Lennon and then by her widowhood. "You know, the thing is, I'm not fighting it," she replies wearily. "I'm considered as a widow, so am I going to stand up and scream about it? I was always considered as John and his wife, and not John and his wife and an artist. Whereas John was not always considered as Yoko Ono's husband. But you see," she says, perking up as she rolls back on to her track of relentless positivity, "you have to learn to use your energy well, and you don't get angry and emotional about it each time, because then you can die from anger."

What Ono believes in now is combating ageism, recently posing in a pair of hotpants to reinforce her message. Advancing age is, she says, an issue that particularly affects women. "Because, you know, men, even in newscasting, the male newscaster is always like daddy, you know, 50 or 60 or something, and then the women have to be 18 and blonde. They get blonder and blonder."

It is an issue that first struck her, curiously enough, at a dance party in New York when she was in her 20s. "I was dancing with some guy and we went to have coffee or something, and he was saying, 'Well, you know, you look alright now but another three or four years and you're gonna start looking old.' He was saying, 'Well, that's what women are, they start to get old very quickly.' And there was a kind of myth about women, that they don't age well, and men do." The mouth purses defiantly.

"Well, I think it's the other way round! How did we manage to be convinced by an idea like that?" With each passing decade, she says, she has been anticipating the arrival of a feeling of dread, but it has yet to come. "Thirty, 40, 50 . . . each time I didn't have that 'oh-oh' feeling at all. And then suddenly 70," she says with excitement, "that's when I thought 'Wow!' And, you know, it was not the wow of 'oh'. It was like 'Wow, this is great! I survived! I'm 70 and, you know, life is beautiful or whatever.'"

What does she think happens when we die, I ask. "I have no idea!" she smiles, flapping her hands upwards. "I think about John," she begins delicately, and one realises that, to Ono, Lennon must always serve to illustrate the immutability of death. "I think about him and I think that we have his work, and when I look back in hindsight I think part of him must have known that he had a short life. He was almost obsessive about creating every moment."

Ono herself hopes to live for another 30 years. "I've tons of things to do," she says with evident glee. "You know, something happened to me when I became 70. I started to feel a tremendous love for the human race, and life and this planet, the universe, the whole shebang. And whenever I'm just crossing the street or something in New York and just feeling the weather, I think, 'This feels like Paris as well!' or 'I remember when . . .' I'm always in a parallel world."

And suddenly, beneath the beetle-black shades, a broad smile spreads through the sharp angles of her face.