In September 1969, the bass player and artist Klaus Voormann, who had recently left Manfred Mann, received a phone call from John Lennon. There was nothing unusual in that. Voormann had known the Beatles for nine years and was part of the band’s tight inner circle. (Excerpt from The Guardian)
Lennon had whimsically agreed to perform live at a rock’n’roll revival festival in Toronto at two days’ notice and was trying to cobble together backing musicians to play as the Plastic Ono Band.
Eric Clapton had agreed to play guitar, but Voormann took more convincing, on the not-unreasonable grounds that headlining a festival with a new band who hadn’t rehearsed didn’t seem like one of Lennon’s more inspired ideas.
“I was up on stage, standing behind Yoko, she’s screaming and shouting and croaking like a dying bird, But I thought: ‘My God, John must be mad to do this.’ I mean, we were lucky people didn’t throw tomatoes at him. People were just open-mouthed."
After initially being rebuffed by Lennon, they struck up a friendship with the band, aided by the fact that Kirchherr invited them to her parents’ house so they could have a bath: the band’s living conditions were so squalid that they were forced to wash and shave using water from the club’s urinals.
Kirchherr began a relationship with the band’s bassist Stuart Sutcliffe and, most famously, the band adopted the same appearance as their new friends, abandoning their leathers and quiffs in favour of combing their hair forward: the mop-top.
Before he left the US, he visited Lennon at home in New York, and found him in househusband mode, boiling rice to make sushi and expounding on the joy of no longer having a record deal or the pressure that came with it. But he was struck by an odd sense of foreboding.“I went with my son, Otto, who was the same age as Sean. We went for a walk in Central Park and John had Sean in a backpack. We walked out through the basement, where the garage was, and I thought: ‘Oh Christ, this is scary. All those really crazy people in New York and there’s John Lennon just walking around with no bodyguards or anything!’ I was scared for him: ‘My God, if that’s what he’s doing every day … I don’t know.’”
