Yoko Ono and Neil onstage at the Royal Festival Hall.
June 16, 2005. Yoko Ono and the Pet Shop
Boys have agreed to meet in a South London rehearsal studios at 6pm. Tomorrow, Yoko is performing at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the annual Meltdown festival, this year curated by Patti Smith. For her final number, “Walking On Thin Ice”, she is to be joined onstage by Neil and Chris who recently remixed the track. This evening they plan to rehearse a little.

Yoko arrives early with her assistant, and seems a little frustrated that no one else is here and that everything may take a long time to set up. In fact there seems to be a little bit of confusion all round; the Pet Shop Boys thought they needed this rehearsal because they would be performing with Yoko’s band, lead by her son Sean Ono Lennon. But the band have finished rehearsing some time ago and have left, and a decision has apparently been made that the Pet Shop Boys and Yoko should appear on stage without any other musicians, something Neil and Chris will only discover when they get here. That decided, there really isn’t too much for them to rehearse.
Neil and Chris arrive punctually, greet Yoko, and move over to the two keyboards they’ll be playing. Quietly, they confer. Neil wonders whether he can remember the chords.

“Oh, that’s right,” he says. “F major, A minor, B minor.”
“I’ve written all the chords out,” Chris shows him. Chris suggests that they hide from the audience the fact that his top keyboard is the machine known as a Radar, through which most of the backing track is being played. “Otherwise they’ll think it’s all on Radar,” he reasons. “And it is on Radar.” He looks around him. “This is where we did the Potemkin rehearsals, late into the night.” He and Neil will be playing new keyboard parts over the top, but he’s still not sure why they’re here. “There’s no point in this,” he says. “I know what I’m going to do.” He gestures to Neil’s keyboard. “And Neil’s going to dick around on that.”
Neil is asked by Yoko’s tour manager how they want their keyboards set out on stage, and Neil talks to him about how strange it is to have discovered that they will now not be playing with Yoko’s band. The tour manager seems to suggest that this decision can be reconsidered with Yoko, an option Neil immediately vetoes. “We have no opinion on anything,” Neil says. “We are expressing no opinion. We have no opinion either way.”

There’s a set list for tomorrow on the floor:
“You II”, “I Want You To Remember Me”, “Why”, “Will I?”, “Rising”, “Snow Falls Silent”, “Onochord”.
Neil goes over to speak with Yoko, to clear up any confusion. “The reason we were here was to rehearse with the band,” he explains.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, and adds, “they’re so nervous.”
“I thought it was quite exciting, doing it with the band,” says Neil. “It’s a good song to jam on. If they don’t want to do it, that’s fine as well.”
Neil and Yoko put their arms around each other, and Neil suggests that they run through the song like this anyway.
“Right,” says Chris, a finger hovering over a button on the Radar, “shall we start then?”
Yoko pulls off her black jacket as the drums start up, and begins to dance, her white scarf flying around. This rehearsal studio is a fairly unglamorous, grubby place — there is no real stage, so she is simply performing on the soiled, threadbare carpet — but from the moment the music starts she seems completely into it. After a few moments, she steps up to the microphone, and the screaming begins.
In Yoko Ono’s music career there has been a lot of screaming. She can sing in her own way — there is a fine half-sung half-spoken vocal for “Walking On Thin Ice” which is playing as part of the backing track — but often she has preferred to express herself by screaming in her own idiosyncratic way, and that is how she chooses to perform this song. She doesn’t just have one way of screaming, either. Many of the noises that come out of her are more like yelps — this evening she often crouches down to fully let these out. Before they started, she told Neil that she had lost her voice, but it is hard to imagine that she is holding anything back.
To one side, Chris plays some new riffs and Neil creates a series of siren-like whooshes on his keyboard. As the song builds to its climax, Yoko shouts, over and over, “Never.., never... never.., never... NEVER...” At the end she whispers some words that can’t be heard. It would be an incredible performance in front of thousands; in an empty rehearsal studio it is quite remarkable. Over the years, critics have sometimes questioned how serious and passionate Yoko Ono is about the music that she makes; no one who saw ten seconds of this could remain in any doubt.

“Bravo,” says Neil after the end. “That’s fantastic. You’ve got the part.”
She smiles shyly, waves, steps towards the door and says, “See you tomorrow.”
After she is gone, Neil and Chris mess around a little more. Neil says that it is weird that their keyboards aren’t side by side, and wonders whether that can be changed. Chris agrees. “Because then we can chat during it,” he says. They run through the whole track once more, jamming fearlessly and layering all kinds of extraordinary noises over the song. At the end, Chris plays an intricate part that moves up and down the keyboard over and over. “Very prog rock, that, wasn’t it?” he says.
They discuss Yoko.
“She was great,” says Chris. “Totally fantastic,” says Neil. “It’s not often you get a private performance
from Yoko Ono,” Neil notes. “It’s an art performance, isn’t it? She really emotes.”
Chris agrees. “I’m still glad we did it, even though it was a waste of bloody time,” he laughs.

“Walking On Thin Ice” was the song Yoko
and her husband John Lennon had been recording on the evening in 1980 which ended with him being shot dead outside their New York apartment building. A wonderful, strange, haunting song, it was released as a Yoko Ono single the following year.
“It’s amazing,” says Chris. “I bought this record when it came out.”
“I bought it the day it came out,” says Neil.
“I bought it the day before it came out,” fibs Chris.
“Yoko sent me a copy,” lies Neil.
“I was there when she wrote it,” counters Chris, adding to the fiction. “Anyway, I always loved the song so it’s a great honour.”
“I was knocked out by it at the time, because actually I didn’t really particularly like the John Lennon stuff from Double Fantasy,” says Neil, “although in retrospect I now quite like that song ‘Woman’. I thought it was a bit corny at the time but I guess I got over that. But ‘Walking On Thin Ice’, I thought this was really... and them finishing recording it and they came back to the Dakota... “He doesn’t need to finish his sentence.

Over the years, Neil has followed her art career. (Before she made any music, or met John Lennon, she was known as a conceptual artist.) Neil saw her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford: “There’s this famous piece she did in the sixties where you’ve got a board on the wall with a hammer
tied to it, and there’s a bucket of nails on the floor, and you get a nail and you hammer it into the wall. I thought, ‘Wow, this is the thing where they had that exhibition at the ICA in 1967,’ or whenever it was, and I picked up the nail and a steward at the gallery rnshed up and said, ‘I’m sorry sir, this is no longer an interactive piece.’ I thought that was a shame in a way, that the piece had become a historical piece in effect, because there were the nails that had been hammered in the sixties. Anyway, I quite like her work — it’s very philosophical. And, without being corny, it’s very Japanese, to take simple everyday natural elements like pebbles, for instance, and make a point with them. The song ‘Imagine’ comes from a piece by Yoko Ono from her book Grapefruit where she has all these instrnctions like ‘imagine the sun’. I think they’re kind of fascinating. They’re all quite good ideas, a bit like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.”

The Pet Shop Boys’ connection with Yoko Ono came through their longterm press officer, Murray Chalmers, who has also long worked with Yoko. About three years ago, when Murray was talking about Yoko, Neil mentioned what a great song “Walking On Thin Ice” was and mooted the idea of them doing a remix of it. (“I knew that she did dance remixes because Tom Stephan had done one,” Neil points out.) Two years later, they were asked to do it. “It’s funny when you get the multi-tracks to do the remix,” says Neil, “you don’t get John Lennon’s guitar part.” The released package of remixes, which also included other new “Walking On Thin Ice” mixes by Felix Da Housecat, Peter Rauhofer, Danny Tenaglia and Rui Da Silva amongst others reached number one on the Billboard dance charts.

At this stage, they were still to meet her. They had sat on the adjacent table to her in a Soho restaurant one night but didn’t say anything because they didn’t know her. But then about six months after first seeing her, Neil was in the same restaurant with a friend and Yoko came in. “This time I said hello, we’d done the remix by this time,” says Neil. “She was nice. She was very friendly. And I was in New York for New Year, at the end of 2003, and I went to the Dakota for tea with her and Murray. And it’s a trip — you go in, the white grand piano’s there. And we had tea.”
Chris didn’t meet her until they both attended fashion designer Hedi Slimane s aftershow party in Paris earlier this year. “Actually she gave me a lift,” he says. “It was great — I was in her car being driven from the Ritz hotel to the restaurant. And I totally understood what John Lennon saw in her originally. She’s very sexual, isn’t she?”
“Yeah — when I met her in the restaurant for the first time I thought she was quite sexy,” says Neil. “That was my first thought.”
A few weeks later, Chris saw her play All Tomorrow’s Parties at Camber Sands. Meanwhile, Murray floated the idea that they might play with her at Meltdown.

“We went and met her in her hotel in London two or three weeks ago and discussed what we were going to do,” says Neil. That was when they planned to play the song with her band.
The Pet Shop Boys discuss all of this with Literally over lunch at the National Film Theatre cafe on the day of the Meltdown show, before their soundcheck.
“This is where we met Will Young,” Chris points out. “He came up to us.”
Today, the sun is out and Londoners are enjoying their lunchtime in the various ways they do. “Well, isn’t this charming?” says Neil. “You can see everyone rollerblading. It’s where everyone pretends they’re in New York. It’s the jogging-at-lunchtime fraternity, which I never really approve of.”
They discuss yesterday’s rehearsal.

“She has invented a form there no one else has invented,” says Neil. “‘I play my record and I scream over it.’ No one else does that. Also, I was quite moved when she spoke in Japanese over the end. It was quite a lament.”
As they eat, a message comes through on Chris’s phone. Yoko’s band are now up for playing along with them and will rehearse with them at the soundcheck.
“Well, we’re not up for that now, are we?” wonders Chris.
“I’m up for anything,” says Neil”.

Inside the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the band are
already playing. As soon as Neil and Chris arrive, they are whisked onto stage to begin working on “Walking On Thin Ice”. Neil chats with Yoko’s son, Sean, holding between them a piece of paper that maps out the song’s structure. When they begin playing, there are horrible distortion problems with Neil’s keyboard. Chris asks if the mix in his monitors can be changed. “I don’t need to hear Neil’s that loud,” he says. “In fact, not at all.”
They’re ready for a complete mn-through of the song.
“Shall we do it?” Chris asks Neil.
“Shall we?” Neil asks the band.

Yoko, who has been sitting in the audience seats wearing a hat of almost top-hat-like proportions, strides to the lip of the stage and climbs up. She does this not completely without difficulty — it’s quite high, and many people would struggle with it — but she is 72 years old and it is quite remarkable that she can do it at all. Onstage, she talks to Neil for a while, then returns to her seat. The band start playing. Sean thumps out a bassline which reminds Chris of the Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra” and the guitarist, Harper Simon (Paul Simon’s son), works on a skittery riff After a while they stop and Sean says, “I’m sorry — I just realised there’s a B chord there, right?” Chris climbs off stage and sits with the Pet Shop Boys’ manager, Dave Dorrell. “Nice chairs, aren’t they?” Chris says. “This’d be a good place for Battleshz~ Potemkin.” Dave nods and says that he saw the films Nosferatu and Faust here. Onstage, Sean holds out Neil’s sheet detailing the song’s structure and asks, “Can somebody photocopy this?”

It sounds pretty good with everyone playing, but various discussions are taking place between various parties until Neil comes over to Chris and says, “Chris, Yoko thinks we shouldn’t do it with the band.”
“That’s fine,” says Chris.
“It’s good,” Neil agrees. “It sounds like the record.”

Neil confers further with Yoko and Sean and someone asks Chris whether he wants to jump into the conversation. He shakes his head. “No, all I want to do is hit the start button.”
Yoko stands up and says goodbye.
“See you later,” says Neil.
Sean steps to the microphone. “Can we get the band back onstage?” he asks. “Paging the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band...”
Neil explains to him that they need to run through the song one more time.
Sean steps back up to the microphone with a new message for the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band. “Forget it,” he says.
When Neil and Chris play the song, Yoko’s keyboard player plays along. Afterwards Sean tells her that she shouldn’t be playing. “We’re not going to play on this at all,” he says firmly.

The Pet Shop Boys retire to their homes to rest for a while, and agree to meet backstage at around 730pm. Chris arrives first, and wanders through the green room, not recognising Patti Smith. Neil turns up soon afterwards, and is soon fretting about his clothes.
“Why did Hedi design these buttons?” he says.
“Why does he make clothes for thin people?” Chris asks.
Neil sighs. “I’m going to have a glass of wine. ‘He’s fallen off the wagon...
Chris points towards the dressing room’s tiny bathroom. “There’s a mirror in there,” he says, “but it’s so horrible that I wanted to disfigure myself.”

Neil has an announcement of sorts. “Well,” he says, “I’m wearing, controversially, two lefthanded contact lenses.”
“Why?” Chris quite reasonably asks.
“It makes absolutely no difference,” Neil says. One is minus 3.5 and one is minus 3.75. And I’ve run out of 3.75.”
Murray arrives, immediately answers his phone (“Pam... it’s Pam Hogg... I’m with Neil and Chris... Neil and Chris... the Pet Shop Boys... “, a conversation which greatly amuses Neil and Chris, the Pet Shop Boys) then is
summoned to find Yoko an appropriate sandwich. (She settles on hummus and this crisis recedes.) Neil and Chris discuss diets. Neil favours his blood group one. “It’s turned into a new religion for me,” he says. “It’s replaced Catholicism.” Chris says that his sister told him to clean his hat for tonight’s performance. “I don’t think it matters that it’s dirty,” he says. “I don’t think it’s going to hit the reviews, do you?”

“The great thing is I haven’t got to sing,” says Neil. “It’s fantastic.”
Their plan is to watch most of the show from seats in the auditorium, and then to slip backstage a few minutes before they are due to appear. They take their seats (which, like all the other seats, have a Yoko Ono postcard and a small torch on them) just before the lights go down.
“It’s so exciting,” says Chris.

“This is the second time you’ve seen this show,” Neil says to him. “She’s one of your favourite artists.”
Yoko appears by cutting her way through the backcloth behind the stage. Between each song, she changes from a selection of hats laid out at stage right. “Somebody asked me how many hats I have,” she says. “I thought that was a rude question.”
It’s a mesmerising performance, musically as well as visually. “Wasn’t that great?” mutters Chris after one particular highlight, the song “Rising”. For the next song Yoko searches for a big flashlight she is supposed to use, to flash out the rhythm she wants the audience to flash back at her, but it can’t be found. Sean also rummages around but comes up empty. “It’s probably a blessing of some sort,” she reasons. Meanwhile Neil and Chris are getting anxious that no one has come to fetch them, as arranged
— the nightmare would be, of course, that they might be suddenly announced while they are still sitting up in these seats. Dave Dorrell decides to lead them backstage.

For the encores Yoko puts on a white hat with black headband while someone in the audience shouts out, “Liverpool! Champions of Europe!” Then she says, “So we have a surprise for you... here come two beautiful boys,” and on they walk. “Pet Shop Boys!” she shouts.
She performs it just as she had in the rehearsal room the day before, except screaming next to Neil with even more force and abandon. At the end of the song they hug. Chris wanders off the stage and misses the bow, but then returns and they line up, holding hands, with Yoko in the middle. Before leaving the stage for the final time, Yoko gathers her hats.

In their dressing room, a satisfied Neil and Chris conduct a brief review of what has just happened.
“It was a contrast to the rest, I think,” says Neil. “The main part was so beautiful.”
“We hadn’t discussed what to do at the end,” Chris laughs.
“My hands were trembling,” Neil says. “I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. I made
my live keyboard debut.”
“I don’t think anyone could hear me,” says Chris.

“I could hear you,” Neil says. “You were doing your Patrick Cowley thing.”
Neil chats in the doorway with Harper Simon about how Yoko has “a natural flange on her voice — nobody else does that”.
“She’s a wonderful anarchist, or something,” says Harper.
“She’s the Marlene Dietrich of the avantgarde,” says Neil. “That’s my new soundbite.”
After mingling for a short while in the crowded, sweaty, underground green room, Neil and Chris head off in a waiting car to a party at Sam Taylor-Wood’s house.
“I feel in just the right mood to go to a party now,” Chris declares. “We should always do someone’s encores before a party.”