An interview with John Lennon from December 1968, printed in the January 1969 issue of Keele University’s student magazine. There’s more about the background for the interview - including a sweet bit about John and Yoko collecting them from Weybridge station and giving them lunch - as well as scans of the whole magazine (including a Pink Floyd interview) at the link.

John and Yoko spent most of December 1968 giving interviews. This one was with two students: Maurice Hindle wrote to John through the Beatles fan club, and was amazed to get a reply. He took colleague Daniel Wiles, who had a tape recorder - and who had already met Yoko. “If you look at UNIT magazine in 1967 you will find an article I wrote based on an interview I did with Yoko Ono about her film making. I actually got Yoko Ono to come up to Keele to give a performance in the FY Lecture Theatre (as it was then). I remember we paid her the princely sum of £40 for her visit." But unlike most of John’s interviews from this period, it’s not a JohnandYoko interview, even though she was there that day.

Hindle remembers: “I very clearly remember how up to the point of Weybridge station the pressure of the whole event was on me to take responsibility for having set the whole thing up – which included my decision to kick-start the interview by showing Lennon John Hoyland’s ‘open letter’ to him in Tariq Ali’s Black Dwarf paper - I knew it would get Lennon’s back up and make him talk about the things I wanted to hear about.” The letters described the Beatles as “less revolutionary than the Rolling Stones”, which went down about as well as you’d expect with John.

But he also finds time to enthuse about his new macrobiotic diet, and express his pride in how well The White Album is recorded. I love his enthusiasm for the technical side, of how much better the Beatles now are at using the resources of a recording studio: “we sounded more like us on this record than we do on the first one.”