A long-lost interview with John Lennon, rediscovered in a basement by the young DJ who conducted it 50 years ago and in which the former Beatle speaks of fears the US government was tapping his phone, is being aired on what would have been the singer-songwriter’s 85th birthday.
Nicky Horne was 24 and an up-and-coming DJ with London’s Capital Radio when he was invited to the star’s New York apartment for a wide-ranging interview.
While parts of the interview were broadcast on Capital in 1975, Horne recently found the original reel-to-reel tapes in a dusty box at home and thought: “This is gold dust.”
Lennon, who had sued the Nixon administration over illegal wiretapping and surveillance amid his battle to avoid deportation, speaks of his suspicions that he was monitored over his anti-war activism.
He explains he wanted to “just throw away” his fourth solo studio album, Walls and Bridges, until friends persuaded him not to. He also expressed now poignant hopes that his best music was yet to come, and that “apart from acts of God, I will be around for another 60 years and doing it until I drop”.
Interviewed in a Boom Radio special to be broadcast on Wednesday, veteran broadcaster and station presenter Horne recalls meeting Lennon at his Dakota building apartment, outside of which the songwriter would be shot dead five years later by Mark David Chapman.
Lennon told Horne: “I know the difference between the phone being normal when I pick it up and when every time I pick it up, there’s a lot of noises.
“[The administration was] coming for me one way or the other; I mean, they were harassing me. And I’d open the door and there’d be guys standing on the other side of the street. I’d get in a car and they’d be following me in a car and not hiding.”
Lennon said while he couldn’t prove tapping at the time: “I just know there’s a lot of repairs going on in the cellar [of the Dakota building].”
He was not the only rock star the US administration had qualms about, he said. “Mick [Jagger] had to vanish up his own manhole to get Keith [Richards] and the rest of them in to tour even. I mean, he did a lot of behind-the-scenes work just to get ‘em to be allowed in. So all of us have problems. It’s just that I wanted to stay here.”
Of his solo Walls and Bridges studio album, which went gold in the US, and was written and recorded during his 18-month separation from Yoko Ono, Lennon confessed he “couldn’t stand to listen” to the studio tapes at first, and thought to “just throw this away”. He then played them to friends “and they said: ‘Hey, it’s all right.’ So I said: ‘It’s all right. Oh it’s not bad at all. I quite like some of it myself. OK, let’s put it out.”
Describing his day-to-day life, he said: “Basically it’s a bedroom, a studio, a TV, a night out, back home.”
Horne reveals he was nervous before the interview, with Lennon putting him at ease and even baking chocolate cookies for him. But sitting cross-legged on the singer’s white shag pile carpet to interview him, Horne “realised as I looked down that I’d spilt some chocolate crumbs on this pristine white carpet, and I was trying desperately to sort of pick them up one by one so that he didn’t see that”.
Horne reveals the full story in a broadcast special of how he managed to land the interview with the former Beatle and what happened behind the scenes, while playing some of the interview on Boom Radio at 9pm on Wednesday.
