A recording claimed to be a rare and unreleased John Lennon recording session has gone on sale in the USA.
The recording available at www.lennontapes.com claims to have been recorded on August 19, 1980 at the Hit Factory in New York.John Lennon and Yoko Ono were recording the ‘Double Fantasy’ album as well as ‘Milk and Honey’ at the Hit Factory.
These recordings if for real sound like vocal warm-ups for John and feature covers of ‘Mystery Train’, ‘Stay’ and ‘Dream Lover’.
Info at the lennontapes site states, “This 13 minute selection of John’s vocals, singing from the vocal booth on August 19th 1980 was recorded on high quality tape. From that master recording, listen to some great moments of John speaking to the band, kidding around with his recording engineer and as he performs three songs, “Dream Lover” with a medley into “Stay A Little Bit Longer”. He then jokes around with everyone and then performs Mystery Train (the song Elvis Presley had made famous).”
If the recording is real, then surely Yoko Ono would own the rights. How it came to be released via a third party still remains unknown.
It is claimed that video director Jay Dubin filmed John and Yoko on that day at the studio with the intention of producing music videos for the ‘Double Fantasy’ album. None of that footage has ever surfaced but this audio recording is claimed to be outtakes.
We await a comment from Yoko Ono to see if this is real.
