Item #39079 UNFINISHED MUSIC No. 1: TWO VIRGINS by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
UNFINISHED MUSIC No. 1: TWO VIRGINS by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
UNFINISHED MUSIC No. 1: TWO VIRGINS by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

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UNFINISHED MUSIC No. 1: TWO VIRGINS by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

London: Apple Records, 1968. LP record (SAPCOR 2/613012). Sleeve photographs by John Lennon, taken in early October 1968 at Ringo Starr's Montagu Square flat using a delayed action shutter. Printed note by Paul McCartney to back cover (a line picked at random by him from the Sunday Express): "When two great Saints meet it is a humbling experience. The long battles to prove he was a Saint."

The first of three experimental albums by John and Yoko released on Apple Records, recorded during an all-night session at Kenwood in May 1968 that also marked the consummation of their relationship.

The record includes vocal improvisations, birdsong, amplifier feedback, renditions of nursery rhymes and music hall songs, distorted instruments and other sound effects, many of them employing the use of tape loops, several of which had been made recently by Lennon with his childhood friend, Pete Shotton.

More famously, the album's cover art blew apart the public's image of the Beatles, and caused ructions at EMI, who refused to produce the sleeve. It also caught the attention of the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover. Yoko had already appeared in public naked, including as a 'contestant' in a spoof beauty contest for Jean-Jacques Lebel's Happening at the Knokke-Le-Zoute film festival in December 1967, but for John it marked a distinct turnaround from the view expressed at Allen Ginsberg's birthday party in London in June 1965 where, after the poet had removed all his clothes, he quietly complained to Miles that "You don't do that in front of the birds!".

Disc Near Mint in original black paper inner liner; sleeve Very Good plus (faint ringwear to front cover; some laminate lift to back cover; light soiling along edges and a little crimping to spine). Contemporary 'British Broadcasting Corporation' (Birmingham) printed address label enclosed. A nicer than usual copy of the UK issue, released on 29 November 1968 in a pressing of only 5000 copies, far fewer than the American issue that preceded it.

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