3:AM Magazine

I’ve been listening to Yoko Ono since I was ten years old. I discovered her “Don’t Worry” on the B side of a John Lennon single from 1970. I loved the photo of a half-eaten apple at the center of the record.
I spent that week’s pocket money on the single and played it obsessively on my little grey plastic, mono player, much to the irritation of my parents, who if they’d got their hands on it, would have probably burnt it. Yoko’s wailing “don’t worry” mantra was one of the most reassuring things in my young, disturbed childhood. I felt different, an outsider, as only children sometimes do.

For Yes, I’m a Witch, Yoko has assembled a group of musicians / friends to remake, remodel songs from her back catalogue: Peaches, Anthony and the Johnsons, Cat Power, DJ spooky and punk gals, Le Tigre… They have produced something, subtle, considered and audacious.

What you get in 17 tracks is incredibly diverse, catchy, pop song Yoko, to the beloved sonic screeching witch, of the title track:
“I’m a witch, I’m a bitch
And I’m not gonna die for you,
You might as well face the truth,
That I’m gonna stick around for quiet awhile’”

“Death of Samantha” is simply beautiful — with the barest of tweaking by Porcupine Tree which adds extra melancholy to an already haunting song (from Yoko’s best album, the 1973 Approximately Infinite Universe) gently strumming acoustic guitar, sparse piano: perhaps “Death of Samantha” could be an alternative signature tune to “Walking On Thin Ice”.

“…People say I’m cool, yeah, I’m a cool chick, baby’”

DJ Spooky dismantles “Rising”, the title track to her 1996 album. Yoko sounds like she’s calling to prayer and then is right up in your ear, as the song swings from a hymn-like dirge into a spiralling dub of samples, a lone tambourine beat and the sound of a plane taking off.

I wondered on first listen what had Anthony of the Johnsons added to “Toy Boat” that rendered it different from its original lullaby status? Anthony’s deft water colour shadings of icy piano and voix d’angelus backing vocals, make the song, spacy and dreamy.
If Music can be about seeing the conjuring of memories, images, in “Toy Boat” I see Yoko in a vast empty landscape (Eternity?) sitting, singing, at a toy piano. Her songs for me are like psychic bulletins from the future, or freak outs from the past. Yoko has always been ahead of her time; either at the epicenter of things or else right at the very edge of the ledge. And what this record does, is make her work, new, now, and utterly contemporary.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yoko!

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Bertie Marshall is the author of novel Psychoboys and punk memoir Berlin Bromley. He belonged to the legendary Bromley Contingent.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Saturday, March 3rd, 2007.