Yoko Ono active as ever at 80

19 February 2013 - 02:15 By Reuters
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now
John Lennon and Yoko Ono
John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Half a lifetime ago, artist Yoko Ono lay in an Amsterdam hotel bed with her husband, John Lennon, staging a week-long "bed-in" for peace.

The couple said they felt very alone in their activism.

Today, Ono, whose energy for campaigning has never tired, sees a world full of an activism that maintains her energy and faith in humanity.

"When John and I did the bed-in, not many people were with us. But now there are so many activists; I don't know anyone who is not an activist," she said in Berlin yesterday on her 80th birthday.

The bed-in protest by the late Beatle and Ono in 1969, against the Vietnam War, was repeated in Montreal, Canada. Press attention was huge but much of it was mocking.

Ono, gave a sell-out concert in Berlin on Sunday with her son, Sean Lennon. It closed with the anthem "Give peace a chance".

Ono said it was still crucial that people "stand up for peace".

The artist, born to a wealthy Japanese family in Tokyo in 1933, is now a passionate opponent of fracking, a technology that has sharply lifted energy output in the US but which critics fear pollutes water deep underground and increases the risk of an earthquake .

"Fracking is an incredible risk to the human race, I don't know why they even thought of doing it," she said.

Ono, whose birthday is being marked by a major retrospective of her work in Frankfurt, Germany, said she feels that she is becoming freer in her art.

"My attitude has changed . I'm allowing things to happen in a way I hadn't planned before," she said.

"I'm surprised that I'm 80 . Not everybody gets there."

subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now