Celebrity

John Lennon released a highly controversial album while still with The Beatles. Here's why his bandmates were unhappy with this decision.

Published on July 13, 2023

The Beatles were still together as a band when John Lennon released his Two Virgins album with Yoko Ono. The album was experimental, so it was a tough sell to even the most dedicated Beatles fans. It didn’t help that Lennon and Ono posed fully nude on the cover. While Paul McCartney wrote album notes for Two Virgins, he reportedly was not a fan of the cover photo. Neither were George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Here’s why the band was so concerned about the controversial album cover. 

The Beatles did not like John Lennon’s album cover for ‘Two Virgins’

In 1968, Lennon and Ono released Two Virgins, the first of three experimental albums. While many listeners didn’t like the album’s contents, the bigger source of controversy, by far, was the cover. It features full frontal nudity from both Lennon and Ono. Many record stores refused to sell it altogether, and the ones that did had to put a paper bag over the image. 

According to Barry Miles in the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, the other Beatles were “horrified” by the brazenness of the cover. They didn’t necessarily object to the nudity, but they worried the cover could damage The Beatles’ public image. Sir Joseph Lockwood, the head of EMI Records, expressed the band’s concerns in a conversation with Lennon. 

“No, it’s not all right. I’m not worried about the rich people, the duchesses and those people who follow you,” Lockwood said, as quoted by Miles. “But your mums and dads and girl fans will object strongly. You will be damaged, and what will you gain? What’s the purpose of it?”

Apple Corps’ Peter Brown said McCartney “hated the cover beyond words,” but McCartney still wrote the sleeve notes for the album. 

John Lennon may have used the cover as a way to pull away from The Beatles

The album cover, of course, did not turn all The Beatles’ fans against them. Still, it was a bold move that Lennon and Ono claimed to have made in the name of art. It may also have been a way for Lennon to separate himself from his band. 

Lennon spoke about feeling ready to move on from The Beatles shortly after he met Ono. He wanted to grow as a musician with her, not his longtime bandmates. The Two Virgins album cover not only firmly and very visibly established him as Ono’s partner, but it separated him from The Beatles. While they had moved away from their mop-top image of the early 1960s, they were still a relatively clean-cut group. Lennon worked hard to separate himself from this image in his solo career. This album cover was the first step in that direction.

John Lennon’s aunt felt similarly about the album cover 

One of the cover’s biggest critics was Lennon’s aunt, Mimi Smith. Her problem wasn’t that there was nudity on the cover. She just didn’t think that Lennon or Ono looked particularly good in the image.

“It would have been all right, John, but you’re both so ugly,” she said, per the book 150 Glimpses of The Beatles by Craig Brown. “Why don’t you get somebody attractive on the cover if you’ve got to have someone completely naked?”

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