Mojo - The Music Magazine

Could you tell me about your experience of writing with John?

The Old Vic were going to do a production on stage of John Lennon’s In
His Own Write [this would eventually open on June 18th 1968], and this
young girl playwright [Adrienne Kennedy] came to see me and asked if I’d be in it. And
she’d taken the pages of John’s books and rearranged them into another
book, with stage directions that read things like, ‘Christmas tree
turns into a horse and gallops off.’ I asked them if they had John’s
permission and they said they hadn’t, so I rang him up and asked him
what he thought. “They must be fucking mad,” he said. I told him I’d
thought of a way how to do it, and he said: “Well, I’ll give you the
rights, then you can do it.” I said, “Wait a minute, we’ll do it
together.” And we did.

So we got together and started to write it. I was in a flat at the time
on Manchester Street [London] and John and I worked on the script one
morning, quite late, near the end of ’67. John said, “Let’s go
somewhere warm.” I thought he meant another room – we ended up in
Africa (laughs). We got hold of a car and ended up in Marrakech, North
Africa. And that’s where we went to continue writing.

What was he like as a collaborator?

The genius of the man was that he had no ego. People think of John as
this egomaniac; well, he was arrogant, but he did not have ego. I asked
him once: “Will there by a drawer full of songs discovered when you’re
gone?” He said: “No, I just ring up Paul and say I think it’s about
time we wrote another hit, and we’d get together and write one.”
Picasso said, “I do not seek, I find,” and John was the same: he found
things, and out of that a song came. He didn’t have a preconceived idea
about things – which is ego. Ego means you can’t make a mistake, and
that’s what kills most people or makes them brittle, like china.

John was able to find a thought when he got there, or something would
strike him and he’d put it down. There was no question of pre-planning,
like with some composers. Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, whom I
worked with, I asked them what came first, the music or the lyrics? And
they said… the cheque! (Laughs.)

Did you not see John as troubled?

Well, Help! was the song. Those lyrics, “I need somebody, not just
anybody…” He really was desperate.  He said: “I married a fucking
privet hedge”, not about Cynthia, he meant the house. It’s all in the
song I Am The Walrus – that’s a man sitting in the middle of life
thinking, Is this it? Sitting on a cornflake? Getting breakfast? It’s
all in there. That’s what that song’s about. Dissatisfaction. Is this
it? Where do I go now?

You had a brief role in Magical Mystery Tour, too. By then, you must
have noticed even more changes. They’d packed in the touring, and…

(Interrupts) They were in the studio. I remember John saying to me,
“Come up to the studio, we’re recording”, and I said “John, I don’t
want to bother you.” He said: “That’s alright Vic, only the fucking
bores turn up”.

You said that you’d talked to them briefly before they went off to
Rishikesh; did they ever talk to you about the experience afterwards?

No, never. They did introduce me to the Maharishi, though, at the Plaza
Hotel in New York. They said to me, “You’ve got to meet him, Vic,” so I
went along. All these New
York ladies were there to see him. He was on the stage giggling away as
they threw flowers in front of him. This one woman said to him, “Tell
me, your Highness, how does one teach children the principles of
transcendental meditation?” And he fell about laughing and said: “My
dear lady, they invented it!”

And what did you think of Magical Mystery Tour?

Now, this is the thing that annoyed me. It had dreadful press, but if
you look at it, Magical Mystery Tour predates Monty Python. It must
have been something that gave Monty Python the idea of doing what they
did. Look at it again. The guy shovelling spaghetti into someone’s
mouth with John Lennon as the waiter? That ridiculous sequence coming
down the stairs singing Your Mother Should Know? All that stuff was
pure surrealism.

Of course, it was all attacked because we like to knock them down. I
was asked “What do they talk about, these pop people?” I said, “Well,
on the set yesterday, we discussed the Freudian interpretation of
dreams, as opposed to the Jungian interpretation.” If they’d been to
Oxford or Cambridge and had decided to do their rooms Chinese for a
year, and dress in Chinese clothes, and eat only Chinese food, then
that’s OK. But if The Beatles did that, who the fuck are they? It’s a
class thing, and it’s still prevalent today. I can’t bear it.

Were you at that dinner party with the Governor of The Bahamas? Did you hear John’s outburst?

I remember everything. That morning, we were filming in what we thought
was a disused army barracks. John said to me, “Hey, Vic, come and have
a look at this,” and he opened this wooden shutter in this corrugated
iron-roofed building. The smell in there was awful, and they’d thrown
all the ill and old people in there. We were shocked because we thought
it was a deserted building.

That night, at a dinner given by the Minister Of Finance in his
marvellous house, with plates of caviar and gold service, John said:
“Hey, excuse me, we were up at what we thought was an old army hut and
it turned out to be full of old people and children with disabilities –
how do you reconcile that with this?”

Well, the next day in the press it was all: Beatles Insult Governor.
But, I mean, these people were appalling. They’d say stuff like, “Which
one’s Ringo? Oh, it must be you – you’re the one with the nose,” and,
“Is that hair real?” It was awful. We started playing up to it, saying
things like, “Oh, what are these? Knives and forks, you say?” Then the
governor’s wife would say, “Look, they don’t even know about knives and
forks!” but we were putting them on. But that’s the remark that John
made and I’ll never forget it.

I’m looking after Paul next week, at the Q awards. Any message you’d like me to give him?

Well I used to take messages to John from Paul when they weren’t
speaking. But please give him my love and tell him that I’m still
alive! I wrote to him after the business of the divorce and I got a
sweet letter back. Of course, I don’t say, ‘Here I am!’ but certainly
say that I said hello.

“Vic says hi…”

Tell him I’m still in love with them more than I ever was.

Victor, so much for talking to us.

A pleasure. Now I’ve got to go to speak to a guy who’s writing a book
about [legendary London theatre impresario] Binky Beaumont. Cheerio!