Photo: Wenn
The microphone John Lennon allegedly used to record his 1971 album Imagine has been put up for sale on Craigslist.
The validity of the microphone hasn’t been officially confirmed, but the London-based seller claims he has authentic documentation and was given the piece of equipment as a gift from his brother.
“All documentation is authentic as it was my brother who purchased it for me as a gift a number of years ago,” he writes.
The Neumann microphone is up for sale for £1,500 and was apparently taken from Ascot Sound Studios in Tittenhurst Park, the tape-based analogue studio built by Lennon and wife Yoko Ono in their Berkshire home. The estate was bought by Ringo Starr in 1973 and the studios renamed Startling Studios.
Early this year it as revealed that Lennon was keen to return to the UK shortly before he was shot and killed by Mark Chapman.
Joe Flannery, a lifelong friend of manager Brian Epstein who handled the band’s early bookings and gave the four lads a place to stay when they needed it, writes in his memoirs that Lennon told him he missed Liverpool and his former band mates.
“We enjoyed a lengthy conversation,” Flannery writes in his book Standing In The Wings: The Beatles, Brian Epstein And Me.
The Neumann microphone in question
“We talked a lot of rubbish of course. He was very well and happy but he missed Liverpool, he missed the others and he missed London but he told me at one stage that he regretted getting ‘too political’. He said that he had made a bit of a ‘tit of himself’.”
Lennon was also apparently worried about former President Nixon’s intentions towards him.
“We came to reminisce about our times eating crap pies and him wanting to go over there, meaning the United States. ‘We should start talking about me coming home before that bastard Nixon gets me,’ he said. I was rather taken aback and asked him to explain. John launched into a diatribe against the former president. He was convinced that even out of office Nixon carried power and wanted him dead. He felt some kind of curse was hanging over him.”
Lennon was shot in the back and killed in December 1980, just hours after signing and autograph for the man who would become his assassin, Mark David Chapman.
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