John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, has opened up about his parents’ ‘co-dependent’ relationship.
The 49-year-old musician claimed that his parents had “fused into one person” before John was murdered outside his New York apartment in December 1980, when Sean was just five years old.
Co-dependent relationship
“Anyone who pays attention to John and Yoko in the latter part of the Beatles, and then together through the Seventies, can see that my dad had this feeling that John and Yoko had sort of fused into one person,” he told The Telegraph.
“He had all these terms [like] ‘JOKO’! He said that they were one, and there should be one word: JohnandYoko.”
While Sean admitted that assessment could be a “bit extreme”, he explained: “I think a modern psychologist might say that [my dad] was a bit co-dependent.
“But the reality is, he didn’t want to individuate any more. They were the first power couple, like Brangelina or whatever.”
Sean added: “He wanted them to be an institution beyond just marriage and family. He wanted them to be an artistic union, a political union, a romantic union.”
Sean, who produced the music and served as an executive producer on the new documentary, One to One: John & Yoko, revealed in December that Yoko “never moved on” after his dad’s death.
© Getty Images‘Chaotic’ childhood
“I grew up with my mom speaking about my dad every day,” he said during an appearance on BBC Radio 6 Music.
“She famously cut her hair when my dad died [because] in Japan, you used to cut your hair when your husband dies. So she spoke of him every day and I think she never has moved on from that relationship.”
© Getty ImagesIn March, Sean spoke to Mojo4Music about growing up in a “chaotic” environment, both personal and political, that filled him with “paranoia,” spanning from his initial years with his father and the way it continued into life with his single mom.
“My early childhood was very chaotic,” he noted. “It was a very strange time. It felt like it was on the heels of this chaos that they had been going through in the early ’70s.
“There were characters hanging around and things that happened that were sort of the echoes of that time when they were being harassed and monitored,” Sean continued.
© Getty Images“There was this FBI agent named Doug MacDougall who came to, quote-unquote, ‘protect’ my mom and me, after dad died.
“Later, we wound up finding out that he had been stealing things from us – my dad’s glasses, some guitars, things like that. And it turned out that he was, like, a bad guy. In fact, he had been working for Nixon to deport John and Yoko. It was really creepy.”
© Getty ImagesSpeaking about the documentary, he said he hopes it can shine a light on his parents’ political stance, which included their outspoken views against the nation’s political decisions, including the Vietnam War.
“To me, ultimately, the message of the film is that they were very brave, John and Yoko, to go from singing songs to hanging out with the Chicago Seven, hanging out with the Black Panthers, and becoming real radical activists,” he said.
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