Welcome to Nothing is Real, a podcast about the Beatles.

Everybody thinks they know the Beatles, but how much do we really know?

My name is Jason Carty.

And we are live on tape from Dublin. And this is the second part of our discussion about the year in 1980, the biggest year of change for the Beatles. And when we left, we were, we'd only got into April. Paul McCartney has put out his coming up single. It's hit the radar of John Lennon. John Lennon's also listening to lots of other music

at the time. And at the end of April, John starts writing. He'd been doing bits and pieces.

I mean, there is this myth that he subsequently propounded that really he just put his guitar

down in 1975, 1976 and had done nothing.

But he's clearly he's kind of fiddling around with bits of songs.

But yeah, within sort of a week of hearing coming up,

he demos the song Dear Yoko, which will appear on double fantasy.

And the thing that I think is amusing is the following day, Yoko instructs him to observe a 10-day silence for the purposes of clearing out his head.

So I think, you know, I've written you this song, darling, dear Yoko, very nice.

You can just shut up for 10 days.

It's an interesting...

Keep it to yourself.

Keep it to yourself.

But it starts to unlock John's creativity and actually...

Yeah.

It's the trickle that eventually leads to a big flood.

I think so.

And, you know, Yoko is very into numerology and, you know, all of these sort of, she's tarot readers

and things like this.

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