(Credits: Far Out / Parlophone / Eric Koch / Anefo / National Archives)
Wed 3 September 2025 20:46, UK
Without wanting to be too crass about it, one would imagine there were few more effective ways of selling an album in 1968 than sticking a starkers John Lennon on the cover.
While Beatlemania had long since died down, especially after the whole “bigger than Jesus” fiasco, the band were still comfortably the biggest in the world. Lennon in particular was still one of its most famous people, and what’s more, the man who was introduced to America on Ed Sullivan with the caption “Sorry girls, he’s married” was no longer married.
The marriage between Cynthia Powell and John Lennon had always been an abrasive one. The particulars of it all are for a different article than this one, but suffice to say, their divorce in 1968 had been a long time coming. The straw that broke the camel’s back was not so much Cynthia’s discovery of Lennon’s affair with conceptual artist Yoko Ono as his complete antipathy towards hiding it. While Cynthia had been holidaying in Greece, Lennon invited Ono over to stay the night.
Instead of doing the kind of things that paramours do, Ono stumbled upon a collection of home recordings that Lennon had made. You see, Lennon had initially met Ono because of his affinity for dense, conceptual art and his way of making it was to record ambient, experimental music far too out there for his Beatles bandmates to ever consider putting on the records. Yet. Ono was completely enraptured by them and insisted that they spend the rest of the night making a collection of their own recordings before doing… what paramours do as the sun came up.
Whatever you may say about the nature of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s relationship, one thing that you cannot deny is their artistic chemistry. The two of them were as in sync with each other as Lennon had been with Paul McCartney a decade earlier, but in completely different mediums. The two of them put all their out-there ideas into these recordings, and by the time Cynthia unexpectedly arrived home the next day, she found the two lovebirds sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring into each other’s eyes.
Why did John Lennon and Yoko Ono choose the cover of this album?
The damage was done. The divorce was finally set in motion, and John Lennon was free to pursue his relationship with Yoko Ono more or less publicly. The two of them decided to keep making those experimental recordings, less to make music together or even to make art that anyone else would observe, but more as a way of documenting the early years of their relationship. There was even an eye on having it document the rest of their lives together. Never let it be said that Lennon and Ono weren’t all in on each other from the very beginning.
Thus, the two of them continued their experiments over the course of the year, but always came back to the tape they made during the first night they spent together. They found something almost holy in it and decided to release it as a studio album in the winter of 1968. Now, a record needs a cover, and Lennon knew just what to do. In his mind, the record was the sound of two innocents. He said the album was the sound of “us expressing ourselves like a child does.” Thus he wanted the cover to be the two of them in their barest form. Literally.
The front cover was a photo Lennon took of him and Ono, arm in arm, completely naked with everything plainly on display. With the back cover being them in the same pose from behind. In a way, this works. This is a work of radical, transgressive art, after all, and through that lens the cover works. However, this is a work of radical, transgressive art made by the single most famous pop star on the planet and his cock and two balls were on the cover.
People were not happy, it’s safe to say, to the extent that in many markets the album was impounded under obscenity charges. Even where the record was released, it was put up in a brown paper bag with a hole strategically cut in it to show Lennon and Ono’s faces. That’s before you actually put the thing on and hear the confusing musique concrete found within.
Yet, Lennon and Ono were, understandably, proud of the record, which they ended up titling after the state they thought of themselves in when they met. Two Virgins.
Related Topics