Yoko arrives noiselessly to let me in to her lovely creamy hotel room. She doesn’t wear shoes indoors and if you go to her creamy home in the Dakota Building in New York you leave them off at the door. A great leveller I think.

She is compact and tiny in her trademark navy tracksuit and pale blue tinted round glasses. Her hair is artfully spiked and her skin flawless, smooth, no saggy bits. It’s impossible to believe she’s just had her 75th birthday. She is weirdly ageless, her face unchanged throughout the years. It’s as if all her suffering has been contained on the inside and never made a line on her face. 

Her 75th birthday part organised by her son Sean was in “a punky kind of club called Joe’s Club in New York. Most people would give their 75-year-old mother a little dinner party. But there was a stage and he got his band playing and he backed me up and I went on singing until one in the morning. I was so high I couldn’t sleep till the next afternoon,” she giggles. “I looked at my friends and thought ooh, they look rather elderly, rather grey. Perhaps we should go home for their sake,” she giggles some more.

Sleep is something she’s not very good at. She’s just flown in from Tokyo and says she hasn’t had any sleep for days. This is only part due to jet lag. It’s part due to Yoko time. Her key to life seems to be to stay awake for as much of it as is possible. It was a family holiday in Japan where she went with Kyoko and Sean. Unusual and rare.

Sean is the son that she has always appeared to dote on. She always talks of him with immense pride. “He’s just so so talented.” She’s unstoppable in her praise.

Although it may have seemed a normal family thing to do, go on holiday together, for Yoko it was even more important to spend time with her children together. Kyoko, now 44, and Yoko have been separated for much of their lives. It’s a pain she doesn’t talk about easily. 

When she fell in love with John Lennon her life as she knew it fell apart on many levels. She was an established conceptual artist and her music was experimental. She lost herself in influencing Lennon. She once said, “John and I ruined both of our careers by getting together although we weren’t aware of it at the time.” 

For Yoko though it ruined more than her art and her music. Although one could argue it gave her another dimension. Her then husband, American jazz musician Anthony Cox, refused to let Yoko see their daughter Kyoko from the age of six.  

The relationship with Lennon was an unstoppable force. You’d think that she would never have got over the pain and the anger of having her daughter taken away. She simply says her ex-husband had his reasons, he thought he was doing it for the best. Ever the diplomat.

“I am into healing.” Perhaps that’s her way of survival, never to acknowledge the pain. In Japan she’s about to publish a self-help book. She says it’s filled with “recipes for life.” She’s certainly had plenty of practice at solving her own problems. Losing her daughter, living with John was in some ways “beautiful” but Lennon must have been an overwhelming, difficult man. He left Yoko for their secretary May Pang before they got back together to have Sean. But more of that later.

It was up to Kyoko to get in touch with Yoko and they were reunited in 1994. “Kyoko wanted to have a child and her husband said before you do this you should see your mother. And I think she missed having a mother.” The way Yoko says it in such an understated way it has resonance. A real mother, even though she had other mothers, presumably amoratas of Cox. “I missed her, of course. But I’d totally given up.” Can it be true that there are no remnants of bitterness for the years they spent apart? “It’s interesting, isn’t it. 

“I was suspicious at first that maybe she felt she had to be nice to me. But no, the thing is Kyoko is really nice. It could have gone another way but it worked out very well. And sometimes I think if we are together all the time my character and her character, we would have clashed.”

This is relentless Yokoism, the glass is just not half full it’s brimming with vintage champagne. Her attitude is everything is beautiful and everything that isn’t can be.

There is no doubt that the holiday in Japan was a bonding mission. Not that it could ever make up for all the years they spent apart. But Sean and Kyoko have a natural empathy. They get on well. 

“It’s strange, they have been separate most of their lives but they are both very intelligent people and they connected very well. It’s funny.” Is there sibling rivalry? “No. Sean treats her with respect and love and she does the same. I am lucky, instead of them hating each other. They could you know. But it’s not like that. 

“DNA is a strange thing. Kyoko and Sean’s handwriting is so similar it’s impossible to tell the difference. Mine is totally different to theirs. People say she looks like me. Sean looks like John and he just played me his latest CD which is an incredible piece of music. Actually I wanted to go to sleep in the car back from the spa in Tokyo because it was a long ride but Sean got out his music and it was very beautiful. I couldn’t sleep because I was so proud of him.

“And people say that Kyoko is copying me because she is an artist, a photographer. I never saw her work until recently. She finally had the courage to show me her photographs. I couldn’t believe it. They are so unique. They are photo collage, so original. I didn’t even know she did that.”

Of course there’s maternal pride when she talks about her daughter’s work, but also respect as a fellow artist. And as well as that a kind of fascination in the way her daughter has worked out. It’s as if her influences were a trace memory even though she wasn’t allowed to nurture her.

There’s a pause, and you feel a little of Yoko’s sadness for the years they spent apart. But only a little.  When I suggest that Cox took her away to punish her she says, “Maybe he just wanted control over his daughter. He didn’t think it was good for his daughter to be with us and maybe he was right because we were going through such an incredibly difficult time politically and all that.” 

Even though in 1969 Yoko won custody of Kyoko, Cox, then part of a Christian sect, scooped her away. It was the year of the famous Bed In. The end of The Beatles and the beginning of John and Yoko. Living together, working together, fighting for peace together. In 1973 Lennon went off with May Pang, an affair which Yoko encouraged. “I just felt I needed some space and it was really good that I got that, otherwise I don’t think I would have survived as a person. Also, when I look back, I see it was good for John that I gave him freedom. Since John announced that he was in love with me we were just together all the time. The more people that tried to break us up the closer we got to each other.”

The world certainly seemed obsessed with their closeness. No Beatles wife ever had an easy ride, especially one that proffered public displays of affection. Any images of togetherness, of either Paul and Linda, or John and Yoko, seemed to make people furiously resentful. In fact Yoko was reviled. Did she talk to Linda about what it was like to be the object of mass hatred? “Each of us was faithful and loyal to her husband and we didn’t want to complain.” Did she have any sympathy for Heather Mills McCartney. “It’s a different age now. It’s been interesting to watch. I feel very badly that this was happening. But you know Linda and I would never have thought of a situation like this.” She could say more, but she doesn’t. Odd, that one of the most famous couples in the world actually spent 18 months apart.  “I just thought we needed a breather. I didn’t know if it would end completely. I just took a chance.” 

First and foremost Yoko has always been an artist. Her art has always been a way to cauterize her emotions and extricate herself from pain. She has always been a loner and has always needed alone time. “Alone time is so important for a conceptual artist. When you have a partner always telling you what to do you always have to think about that person. Are you hungry? Shall we do this? When I was a little girl my mother would say, ‘Yoko, are you there? I’m talking to you’. And I was, ‘What?’” She creates a special vague expression. “In other words I created a solitude within me.”

But as well as needing solitude and needing to be an artist, she needed to be a woman, a mother, and she needed John. When he came back to her she very much wanted it to work.

“When we were broken up I went to see a psychic. I was with a girlfriend, we were just walking around the village and we saw a sign. Lines of people at about ten tables with psychics. When it was my turn the lady said to me, ‘You are going to meet somebody who is very like your husband. Extremely famous and also a musician and you are going to have a good time because this guy is going to be kind and gentle.’ Outside we were laughing our faces off. Somebody as famous as my husband? I would know that guy. There is nobody like that. This woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But then a few weeks later John came back to me. But he came back a different person. He was different. He had been nice before but he had a temper and all that. This time he was really considerate.” 

It wasn’t long before she became pregnant. When she talks about this time she chooses her words carefully, as if she’s reconjuring just how wary of it all she was. She didn’t want to do the wrong thing. She didn’t want to force John back into a relationship with her. And she was worried she would not carry the baby to full term. 

“John was very eager to have a kid but I didn’t want to just make him feel I’d grabbed him. I wanted to give him the choice of whether he wanted to be with me. I didn’t want him feeling depressed and angry. I’d had I think three miscarriages and John said, ‘You are going to have this one. And I said, OK. I would like to give it to you.’ I was a career orientated woman and I was 42. I could have lived without the pregnancy, but he had suffered so much from being separated from me… I thought I made him suffer so I should go through with this and make him happy. So because of my history of miscarriages I had to stay in bed for the whole pregnancy. John got a wheelchair and he would push me into the kitchen where there would be lunch. Isn’t that sweet? And I accepted that, so in a way we both changed. It wasn’t a decision I made lightly…”

In many ways it was the defining decision of her life. She and Sean were inseparable from the start. She reminisces of him now singing and playing in the studio when he was four or five and they were recording the Double Fantasy album. That really was their fantasy period. When John died she wrote, “Half of me flew away with him.” There is no doubt she feels connected to him still in death. Once she felt his spirit tapping at their window, like Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Her round glasses look like his. Her work on the Imagine Peace campaign is perhaps his message speaking through her. But it was as much her politics that influenced him in the first place. 

Although she had a relationship with antiques dealer Sam Havadtoy, it ended in 2001 and there have been no other lovers. “It was more like friends.” She is still in love with John and John’s legacy. Does she get sad? Does she get angry? Has she become very detached in order to survive?

“I do get angry. But it’s not good for my body so I try to release my anger. If you have burdens that you don’t want to carry it becomes too much, so I always say I cast my burdens to the Almighty within, because we all have the Almighty within us.” There is no doubt that Yoko has something magnetic and powerful within her. When she says, “I’m going to try to learn not to get hurt because you don’t want that hurt going into your body, but you don’t want to live your life with a shield,” she says it in a way that you understand just how much hurt she’s had. It is a surprise that she’s not totally toxic. Instead her look, even without sleep, is fresh and clean. 

She shows me an invitation to her 75th birthday party. A young Yoko, about 14, in a printed forties dress. The eyes have the same intensity, wise and innocent at the same time.  How is it that so much has happened to her yet her face seems so unchanged? “The secret to not ageing is walk around a lot, don’t eat too much and be active in your brain.” She laughs. She certainly is active, not only for Imagine Peace. She is not only working on the Imagine Peace campaign and still writing music. 2006’S Yes, I’m A Witch album got her rave reviews and cool people working with her like Antony Hegarty of Antony and The Johnsons. 

No longer reviled, but rather admired, loved by her children and without saggy skin. She’s actually rather a miracle. 

 We are in her sumptuous suite at the Mandarin Oriental, London. It’s palatial, looking out onto Hyde Park with a creamy calm that must remind her of the stillness of her own home in the Dakota Building. Yoko Ono has just flown in from Tokyo, a family holiday where she announces she’s had no sleep for several days. She doesn’t seem to need it. She’s animated, unstoppable. 

Wearing her trademark blue tinted glasses and navy body skimming track suit, it’s impossible to believe she’s just had her 75th birthday. She is weirdly ageless. Her skin doesn’t have saggy bits or expression lines. Her hair is artfully spiky. She could be any age. She shows me an invitation to the party. It’s a young Yoko about 14 years old in a 1940s dress. The look is accomplished but vulnerable. Her eyes have the same intensity, a strange mixture of wisdom and naivety. The pose is both stoic and ready for anything.

The party organised by Sean was in “a punky kind of club called Joe’s Club in New York. Most people would give their 75-year-old mother a little dinner party. But there was a stage and he got his band playing and they backed me up and I went on singing till one in the morning. I was so high I couldn’t get to sleep till the next afternoon,” she giggles. “I looked out at all my friends dancing and I thought, oh, they look rather elderly, kind of grey.  Perhaps we should go home for their sake.”

There isn’t any part of her that fits with the idea of elderly parent, dependent or enfeebled. Through most of her life her music was rather mocked, but after 2006’s Yes, I’m A Witch album she got rave reviews and cool people working on it with her like Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons who restored a rather beautiful song, Toyboat, which she wrote when deeply depressed after John Lennon’s death. 

Maybe her time is now. Maybe all those years of her being reviled are finally a shadow. She once said, “In a way both John and I ruined our careers by getting together, although we weren’t aware of it at the time.” She led him into more conceptual experimental music and he led her further into him. There is a sense of a woman once confined now racing with adrenalin. 

She is in the UK to do an art show in a gallery in Liverpool. She is typically vague about this show in which she is to be “unwrapped”. [When she visited it in 1967 she asked the audience at the Bluecoat Gallery to wrap her in bandages. This time she appeared at the redeveloped gallery, after showing a film of the original event, and invited the audience to remove bandages she had wrapped herself in. This was April 4, so you need to put in past tense].  Always conceptual, sometimes controversial. She met John at an exhibition of her work in a London art gallery in 1966 where he asked her if he could hammer an imaginary nail into a board.  She is also running round the world tirelessly promoting Imagine Peace. “The secret to not ageing is walk around a lot, be active in your brain, and don’t eat too much. And I’m always solving very complex problems at a moment’s notice, by that I mean business or artistic problems, not necessarily emotional ones. I don’t know how to control my emotions in a way not to get hurt. I’m really trying to learn how not to get hurt because you don’t want that hurt going into your body. But you don’t want to live your life with a shield,” she says. Her mood weaves from giggly to ambiguous to poignant and sad. Many emotions seem to whir and jump through her body all at once.

She’s had a lifetime of extreme emotions, drama world class, while she has retained a kind of stoicism. Sometimes an outsider in her own life. Perhaps that was her way of survival. She’s about to publish a book in Japan. She says it’s filled with “recipes for life.” 

“I am into healing. Sometimes things just come to me.” She is whimsical and nurturing in equal parts. Extremely magnetic. One of the problems she had to solve in her own life was when she fell in love with John Lennon, her husband, American jazz musician Anthony Cox, refused to let Yoko see their daughter Kyoko, now 45. They were reunited in 1994. “Kyoko wanted to have a child and her husband said before you do this you should go and see your mother, and I think she missed having a mother, a real mother, even though she had other mothers. And I missed her, of course, but I’d totally given up.”

Incredibly there seems no remnants of bitterness for the years spent apart. Yoko agrees, “Interesting, isn’t it. I was suspicious at first that maybe she felt she had to be nice to me. But no, the thing is Kyoko is really nice. It could have gone another way but it worked out very well. And sometimes I think if we are together all the time my character and her character, we would have clashed.”

This is relentless Yokoism, the glass is just not half full it’s brimming with vintage champagne. Her attitude is everything is beautiful and everything that isn’t can be. The holiday in Japan with Sean and Kyoko seemed to be a bonding mission making up for years spent apart. How do they get on with each other? “It’s strange, they have been separate most of their lives but they are both very intelligent people and they connected very well. It’s funny. DNA is a strange thing. Kyoko and Sean’s handwriting is so similar it’s impossible to tell the difference. Mine is totally different to theirs. People say she looks like me. Sean looks like John and he just played me his latest CD which is an incredible piece of music. Actually I wanted to go to sleep in the car back from the spa in Tokyo because it was a long ride but Sean got out his music and it was very beautiful. I couldn’t sleep because I was so proud of him.

“And people say that Kyoko is copying me because she is an artist, a photographer. I never saw her work until recently. She finally had the courage to show me her photographs. I couldn’t believe it. They are so unique. They are photo collage, so original. I didn’t even know she did that.”

There’s an odd mixture of maternal pride and fascination for a daughter who grew up to be so similar to her yet spent most of her childhood with her father. When I suggest that Cox took her away to punish her she says, “Maybe he just wanted control over his daughter. He didn’t think it was good for his daughter to be with us and maybe he was right because we were going through such an incredibly difficult time politically and all that.” 

The holiday to Japan seems to have been an interesting cocktail of bonding and approval seeking, looking at Kyoko’s artwork and listening to Sean’s album. Is there not sibling rivalry? “No, Sean treats her with respect and love and she does the same. I am lucky, instead of them hating each other. They could you know. But it’s not like that. It was beautiful and I think they really enjoyed it.” She sighs reminding me of her sleeplessness. “But there was work too.” Perhaps because she was promoting Imagine Peace, even though it was supposed to be a holiday, or perhaps because suddenly there were all these people round her, Sean’s girlfriend, Kyoko’s husband etc. “Yes,” she says, “I’m always so alone. I do cherish my aloneness. Alone time is so important for a conceptual artist.”

When she was with John they seemed incredibly entangled, as if they themselves were a piece of conceptual art. They did everything together. And while the world couldn’t stand her and couldn’t stand that he was with her, for a time that seemed to drive them further into each other, very difficult if you are an artist and about the expression of the self.

“It’s very interesting when you have a partner always telling you what to do, when you have to think about that person, are you hungry, shall we do this. And then you get pregnant and most of your blood is focused on procreation. So I could not have the inspiration I needed when I was that way. When I was a little girl my mother would always say, ‘Yoko, are you there? I’m talking to you’. And I was, what, what. In other words I created a kind of solitude within me.” 

So were you always able to create that solitude when you had a screaming baby and a demanding husband? “No, but I developed a way of taking it in in a way that didn’t really disturb my core. I created a way of always putting myself in the corner so I could be an observer at arms length away from things that were really happening in my life. I am such an emotional person if I didn’t create that situation I would have been dead a long time ago.” (As a young adult in Japan her family institutionalised her for attempted suicide). It’s strange she appears very detached and very raw at the same time. “Exactly, I developed that as a way to survive.” 

Is she detached from all her emotions? Does she get angry? “I do, but anger is not good for my body so I try to release my anger. If you have burdens that you don’t want to carry and it becomes too much I say I cast my burdens to the almighty within because we all have the almighty within us. But a burden is different to an emotion. Emotions sometimes just overwhelm you… For instance I read somewhere about a composer and he was at a funeral and everyone was crying and he was saddened too but he realised the way his mother was crying was not the same as him. He was crying because the notes were not perfectly right. He was thinking of the funeral as a musical experience on the objective side as a composer, and that’s what happened to me when John passed away. I was totally devastated and people were singing songs outside. 2,000 people singing John’s songs. They certainly didn’t let me sleep. But then a song came to me called I Don’t Know Why. But I grabbed the paper so I could write it down.  In other words I survived my life because I had a security blanket called art.” She took a picture of his broken, bloodied glasses as if to cauterise her pain. 

Art gave her distance to be outside of herself and outside of her pain, yet it was the pain that inspired the art. As a Beatles wife she was hated. She broke up Lennon’s first marriage and was blamed for breaking up The Beatles. People were jealous, they didn’t understand her. She was tiny but self-possessed. Not glamorous or dolly birdy. She was obsessively hated. “I know. It was a bit scary. But what can you do. There are scary things going on in Iraq. I’m alive and that’s how it is. I was thankful for a very exciting experience. I learned about a totally different world.”

Did you bond with the other Beatles wives? Did you talk to them about what it was like to be the object of mass hatred? “Well, the thing is that each of us was very faithful and loyal to her husband, therefore we didn’t want to complain.” Does she have any sympathy for Heather Mills McCartney? “I think it’s a totally different age now. It’s been interesting to watch it. I felt very badly that this was happening, but you know Linda and I would never have thought of a situation like this.” She stifles a little giggle and emphasises, “Never.” Does she talk to Paul? “Yes. I’ve said many times that we do and nobody believes it. But we have been doing business together for the longest time…” Another enigmatic smile from Yoko. 

There is always a resonance of John, an omnipresence. The very image of Yoko, with her distinctive little round glasses, looks like she’s carrying him with her. Her constant promotion of Imagine Peace is another way in which his legacy remains in the world. She often feels him with her. “The first time I thought I saw him I was half asleep and I looked up at the window and it was John and he said, ‘come on, we’ve got to go.’ And I said I can’t come with you because I have Sean and so much to take care of. I said later, not now. And he said, OK. It was like Wuthering Heights. Cathy scratching at the window,” she says tentatively, waiting to see if I believe in the spirit world. 

Within the unstoppable force that was their love, in 1973 they broke up and Lennon took off with their secretary May Pang, at Yoko’s suggestion. “I felt I needed some space because otherwise I don’t think I would have survived as a person. It was good for John that I gave him freedom. We all need some fun in life. Since John announced that he was in love with me we were together all the time. The more people tried to break us up the more we got close to each other. I thought we needed a breather. I didn’t know that it would end completely. I took a chance. When we were broken up I went to see a psychic. I was with a girlfriend, we were just walking around the village and we saw a sign. Lines of people at about ten tables with psychics. When it was my turn the lady said to me, ‘You are going to meet somebody who is very like your husband. Extremely famous and also a musician and you are going to have a good time because this guy is going to be kind and gentle.’ Outside we were laughing our faces off. Somebody as famous as my husband? I would know that guy. There is nobody like that. This woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But then a few weeks later John came back to me. But he came back a different person. He was different. He had been nice before but he had a temper and all that. This time he was really considerate.” 

It wasn’t long before she became pregnant. “John was very eager to have a kid but I didn’t want to just make him feel I’d grabbed him. I wanted to give him the choice of whether he wanted to be with me. I didn’t want him feeling depressed and angry. I’d had I think three miscarriages and John said, ‘You are going to have this one. And I said, OK. I would like to give it to you.’ I was a career orientated woman and I was 42. I could have lived without the pregnancy, but he had suffered so much from being separated from me… I thought I made him suffer so I should go through with this and make him happy. So because of my history of miscarriages I had to stay in bed for the whole pregnancy. John got a wheelchair and he would push me into the kitchen where there would be lunch. Isn’t that sweet? And I accepted that, so in a way we both changed. It wasn’t a decision I made lightly…” Yet when she talks of Sean she brims with love and pride. She reminisces of him singing and playing when in the studio when he was four or five and they were recording the Double Fantasy album. 

When John died she wrote that “half of me flew away with him.” The part that remains is the Yoko that tries to distance herself. She had a long relationship with antiques dealer Sam Havadtoy, which ended in 2001. “It was more like friends and that makes a difference.” One feels that in a way she is still with John. She sometimes talks about him in the present tense and she often uses his words. His Imagine Peace message speaks through her. And she says very quietly, “So in a way I don’t think of that moment as the end of his life.”