Listening To and Hearing John & Yoko’s Message and Music of Peace

An Interview with Thierry Planelle, Artistic Director and Sound Designer

Former artistic director of Virgin Music/EMI and director of Artists and Repertoire at Virgin France, Thierry Planelle is presently responsible for the aural identity of the collections of Hermès and Jean Paul Gaultier. Independent producer with the Maturity Music label, he is also a founding member of Radio Nova Paris. In addition, he collaborated on the exhibition John Lennon: Unfinished Music at the Cité de la Musique. More recently, he created the sound track for the exhibition Warhol Live at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Presently, he is responsible for the sound track of Imagine.

Just as in the exhibition Warhol Live, recently presented at the Museum, sound, at once an emotional and educational conduit, will occupy a privileged position within the exhibition Imagine, thanks to Thierry Planelle. This soundscape will closely reflect the entire thrust of the exhibition. From one gallery to another, John and Yoko whisper, murmur, speak, sing, shout, call each other and, most of all, remind us that they often acted as one. For the first time ever, it will be possible to hear excerpts of conversations between the two artists during the recording of songs like “Give Peace a Chance”(three different versions were recorded), as well as media interviews, video excerpts from the 1960s for such anthems as “Power to the People”and “I Dont Wanna Be a Soldier.” The soundscape will also correspond to the record covers, which are at once artistic and autobiographical statements.

What does this peace action of John and Yoko mean to you?
T. P. It’s an artistic happening, a performance and a provocation, as well as a radical political action for peace that had an impact around the world. It might seem a bit naive today, but the action of John and Yoko was so sincere and radical. It is very symbolic of the 1960s, the counterculture…

How does the music of this era inspire you? “Imagine,” “Give Peace a Chance,” protest songs?
T. P. It was a great time for music, a period of immense creativity: rock and pop were in step with their time, with songs delivering messages that appealed directly to youth. Dylan, Lennon, Hendrix… the rock stars of the 1960s and 1970s resembled their public; they were the manifestation of their generation. Music was part of the liberation movements (sex, drugs, civil rights, communities, Love Not War), but it was also the end of the hippy utopia.

What was your inspiration for the design of the sound track for this exhibition?
T. P. I had to go back to the beginning, to listen once again to John’s songs, which we think we all know by heart and which are so strongly identified with their author and composer, to the quality of the melodies, for example, or to the simplicity of a chorus. It was like going on a quest to rediscover the songs of John Lennon.

How did you work with the recordings and sound footage?
T. P. There is an amazing amount of material in the box-set John Lennon Anthology that Yoko compiled in 1998: four CDs of rare recordings, rough takes, studio cuts, excerpts of interviews, live recordings, acoustic versions recorded at home, etc.… It’s very moving and intimate. There is also archival footage, poetry readings, press conferences, radio and television interviews… a lot of sound. I mixed it all into a soundscape, each gallery filled with the voices and music of John and Yoko.

What did you think when you heard the voices of John and Yoko calling each other?
T. P. A love story without end, an endless dialogue…

What do you hope visitors will remember of your sound design for this exhibition?
T. P. It’s the “ballad of John & Yoko.” I hope they hear it like it’s the sound track to a film…