She was once accused on breaking up The Beatles, but Yoko Ono has finally made her positive influence on John Lennon official after being granted a special gift on his behalf.
The National Music Publisher’s Association (NMPA) has announced that Ono will be given a writing credit on Lennon’s biggest solo hit ‘Imagine’, 47 years after it was released.
The announcement, made at a ceremony in New York overnight, comes years after Lennon admitted he regretted failing to credit his wife as a writer on the track, saying he let his ego get in the way.
The ABC reports that a clip from a 1980 interview with Lennon played at the ceremony showed him saying ‘Imagine’ “should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song”.
“A lot of it — the lyric and the concept — came from Yoko, but those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution,” he said.
“But it was right out of Grapefruit, her book — there’s a whole pile of pieces about ‘Imagine this’ and ‘Imagine that’.
“If it had been a male, you know — Harry Nilsson’s Old Dirt Road, it’s ‘Lennon-Nilsson’.
“But when we did [Imagine] I just put ‘Lennon’ because, you know, she’s just the wife and you don’t put her name on, right?”
Ono has been battling a flu-like illness lately and had to be wheeled on stage to accept the award.
“This is the best time of my life,” she said.
The couple’s son Sean accompanied Ono to the event saying it was “the proudest day of my life” to see his mother get the recognition she deserved.
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Lennon was shot dead in 1980 outside his apartment in New York. His legacy has lived on though, inspiring a new wave of musicians and connecting Beatles fans around the world.