The B-52s Classic John Lennon Thought Sounded Just Like Yoko Ono’s Music

The B-52s and Yoko Ono might not be the most obviously similar musical icons, but one evening in a Bermuda nightclub, that was exactly the comparison John Lennon made. These similarities are not only a testament to the Japanese avant-garde artist’s influence on rock music in the 1970s.

It also helped inspire Lennon to return to music, something he had indefinitely put on hold while raising his and Ono’s son, Sean, in their Dakota apartment in New York City.

John Lennon Thought The B-52s Sounded Just Like Yoko Ono

In his final interview before his death in December 1980, John Lennon talked about the origins of his collaborative album with his wife, Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy. Inspiration struck Lennon when he was vacationing in Bermuda with their son, Sean Ono Lennon. Ono had stayed at their home in New York City to attend to business affairs.

“I was at a dance club one night,” Lennon recalled. “Upstairs, they were playing disco, and downstairs, I suddenly heard “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s for the first time. Do you know it? It sounds just like Yoko’s music, so I said to meself, ‘It’s time to get out the old ax and wake the wife up!’” Lennon and Ono collaborated via telephone while Lennon was still vacationing in the North Atlantic.

The B-52s had only just released “Rock Lobster,” which was the Athens, Georgia’s band’s debut release on DB Records. They featured the 1978 single on their Warner Brothers Records full-length debut the following year. It’s still considered one of the most iconic new wave tracks of all time and even inspired the Athens’ hockey team mascot.

How The Song Helped Inspire “Double Fantasy”

Prior to hearing the B-52s’ “Rock Lobster” in a Bermuda dance club, John Lennon had taken an indefinite hiatus to travel, raise his son, Sean Ono Lennon, and essentially take on the role of house-husband to Yoko Ono. But after hearing his wife’s distinctive style in the new-wave track, Lennon felt compelled to start writing music again.

Lennon used a unique electric guitar he acquired around the same time Ono had their son—a bodiless guitar with an adjustable top for balance. The former Beatle hung the guitar on the wall for years, but it caught his attention frequently. “I’d look at it every now and then because it had never done a professional thing. It had never really been played,” Lennon said in his 1980 Rolling Stone interview.

“Next to it on the wall, I’d placed a wooden number nine and a dagger Yoko had given me—a dagger made out of a bread knife from the American Civil War to cut away the bad vibes, to cut away the past, symbolically. It was just like a picture that hangs there, but you never really see.”

“Then, recently, I realized, ‘Oh, goody! I can finally find out what this guitar is all about.’ I took it down and used it in making Double Fantasy,” he continued. Lennon and Ono released the album just under one month before Mark David Chapman assassinated Lennon outside of his home.

Photo by Richard McCaffrey/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images