A remarkable item is being auctioned in Denmark today: a cassette tape with an unreleased song and an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Four Danish youngsters made the recording more than fifty years ago, just months before The Beatles broke up.
It is a tape with 33 minutes of audio. It auction house in Copenhagen expects that the item will yield between 27,000 and 43,000 euros, writes de BBC.
The cassette tape contains an interview for a school newspaper with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which the four recorded in 1970. “We were a bunch of 16-year-old hippies who were especially interested in their protest actions,” Karsten Hoejen recalled at the BBC.
Visit to Denmark
The youngsters got in touch with Lennon and Ono when the couple visited Thy, in northwestern Denmark. Local residents were not aware of their arrival. Once it became known that the famous musicians were in Thy, the couple held a press conference.
The four Danish students had convinced a teacher to take them to the press conference, but a snow storm prevented them from arriving on time. “It took us a long time because of the snow and slippery roads. When we arrived, everyone was already on their way out,” Hoejen says. Still, the boys and a handful of delayed journalists were allowed in.
Never released
Ono and Lennon played a short song called Radio Peace, which was intended as the title song for a radio station. But because the radio station never got off the ground, the song was never released. The recording on the cassette may be the only recording of the song, Hoejen thinks.
Decades after the four recorded the tape, the Dane realized it was a valuable item. The director of the auction house agrees that it is a “very rare” object, because it is probably the only recording of Radio Peace goes. At the same time as the cassette, a copy of the school newspaper will also be auctioned, including photos of the meeting.
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