FILTER BOOKS
We All Shine On:
John, Yoko, & Me
Pictorial Press/Alamy
★★★★
Elliot Mintz
BANTAM. £25
A sympathetic ear and helpful hand: a radio voice’s life with the lions.
Among the supporting cast of John Lennon’s New York years, Elliot Mintz was confidant, fixer and PR to the former Beatle and his wife Yoko Ono. Only now is the omertà Mat Snow that kept the hitherto discreet Mintz on the inside long after Ono’s husband’s murder lifting. Starting in 1971 when he interviewed Yoko for his Los Angeles radio talk show, the relationship intensified over years of often daily marathon transcontinental phone calls from them both. “They could be incredibly sensitive, honest, provocative, caring, creative, generous, and wise,” he remembers, but also “self-centred, desperate, vain, petty, and annoying. In Lennon’s case, also shockingly cruel – even to Yoko.” In his credible, candid, detailed and well-written account, Mintz almost mirrors the couple’s needy yet coolly undeceived feelings for each other. “Why me?” he wonders. Perhaps in him they recognised an unlikely kindred spirit, one usefully rooted in the workaday world they’d long transcended.