Tape of 1970 John Lennon interview sold at auction for £43,000
28 September 2021, 21:24
The 33-minute audio recording was made by four Danish teenagers.
A cassette tape with a 33-minute audio recording of John Lennon being interviewed by four Danish teenagers 51 years ago as well as an apparently unpublished song by the late Beatle fetched 370,000 kroner (£43,000) at an auction in Denmark.
The tape, recorded on January 5 1970, chiefly consists of Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, speaking about being in Denmark and world peace.
It also has the couple singing two songs: 1969’s Give Peace A Chance and Radio Peace, which was made for a radio station in the Netherlands but never released.
The cassette was put up for sale by Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneer in Copenhagen, together with 29 still photos and a copy of the school newspaper for which the teenagers had interviewed Lennon and Ono.
The pre-sale estimate for the lot was 200,000 kroner to 300,000 kroner (31,481 to 47,222 US dollars).
“It is a small item with lots of interest,” auctioneer Jesper Bruun Rasmussen said as he brought the hammer down.
“I thought it was extraordinary that it went above the estimate,” Alexa Bruun Rasmussen of Denmark’s main auction house said.
“Unfortunately it is confidential who the buyer is but I can reveal that it went abroad.”
The Danish teenagers did the interview in northern Denmark at the height of the Vietnam War and the Cold War because Lennon and Ono had “a message of peace, and that was what was important to us”, Karsten Hoejen, who made the recording on a tape recorder borrowed from the local hi-fi shop, said.
After the sale in a packed auction hall, Mr Hoejen said “it exceeded all expectations”.
“There is some kind of relief now,” he said, adding the three surviving men who did the interview have not decided what to do with the money.
Lennon and Ono were in the northern Danish region of Thy because Ono’s ex-husband had moved there and brought their five-year-old daughter Kyoko with him.
Alternative living communities also mushroomed in Denmark from the late 1960s, attracting people from abroad, and music festivals were organised there, inspired by Woodstock and the ones on the Isle of Wight.
Tuesday’s auction was devoted to 20th-century artwork and featured 116 items for sale.
