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Your latest record, 'Power to the People,' and your recent public statements suggest that your views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this start to happen?

I've always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, as I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to dispise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean, it's just a basic working-class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system.

I've never Not been political, though religion tended to over-shadow it in my acid days, that would be around 1965 or 1966. Religion was directly the result of all that superstar crap, religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, 'Well there's something else to life isn't there? This isn't it, surely?'

I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them round. I was very conscious of class, they would say with a chip on my shoulder - but in the hurricane Beatle world it got left out. I got farther away from reality for a time.

What was the reason for the success of your music?

Well, at the time it was thought that the workers had broken through, but I realise in retrospect that it's the same phoney deal they gave the blacks; it was just like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers. That's the choice they allow you now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying in 'Working Class Hero.'

It's the same people who have the power. The class system didn't change one little bit. Of course there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle-class kids in pretty clothes. 3ut nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit.

When did you start breaking out of the role imposed on you as a Beatle?

Even during the Beatle heyday I tried to go against it. So did George Harrison. We went to America a few times and Brian Epstein (the Beatles' late manager) always tried to waffle on at us to say nothing about Vietnam. So there came a time when George and I said: 'Listen, when they ask next time, we're going to say we don't like that war and we think they should get right out.' That's what we did. At that time this was a pretty radical thing to do, especially for the Fab Four.

It's pretty hard when you are Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it's pretty hard to break out of that, to say, 'Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real.'

As someone from the working class, I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game. At one time I used logo around calling myself a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalised madness. It was therapy that stripped away all that and made me feel my own pain.

Who was this analyst you went to?

Janov. His thing is to feel the pain that's accumulated inside you ever since your childhood. I had to do it to kill off all the religious myths. It's the result of your parents and your environment. Janov doesn't just talk to you bout this, but makes you feel it - once you've allowed yourself to feel again, you do most of the work yourself. When you wake up and your heart is going like the clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying "Well. I'll get over it.'

For me, at any rate, it was all part of dissolving the God-trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.

My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor much more of my mother. But Yoko had her parents there and it was the same...

Yoko: Perhaps one feels more pain when parents are there. It's like when you're hungry you know it's worse to get a symbol of a cheeseburger than no cheeseburger at all. I often wish my mother had died so that at least I could get some people's sympathy. But there she was, a perfectly beautiful mother.

Lennon: I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up. They are the ones who have the biggest struggle to say, 'Goodbye, mummy, goodbye, daddy.'

A lot [unclear: 6] Beatle songs used to be about childhood....

Yes, that would mostly be me....

Though they were very good, there was always a missing element....

That would be reality, that was the missing element. Because I was never really wanted. The only reason I am a star is because of my repressions. The only reason I went for that goal is that I wanted to say: 'Now, mummy, will you love me?'

But then you had success beyond most people's wildest dreams.

It was complete oppression. I mean, we had to go through humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classes and showbiz and lord mayors and all that. They were so condescending and stupid. Everybody trying to use us. It was a special humiliation for me because I could never keep my mouth shut and I'd always have to be drunk or pilled to counteract this pressure.

It was very miserable - apart from the first flush of making it, the thrill of the first Number One record, the first trip to America. At first we had some sort of objective, like being as big as Elvis - moving forward was the great thing, but actually attaining it was the big let-down. I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I'd always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality.

Your album, Yoko, seems to demand an aesthetic measure of everyday life, suing art to make people face up to themselves.

Yoko: Exactly, I want to incite people to loosen their oppression by giving them something to work with, to build on. They shouldn't be frightened of creating themselves - that's why I make things very open, with things for people to do, like in my book 'Grapefruit.'

Politics and culture are linked up aren't they? I mean, workers are repressed by culture not guns at the moment.

Lennon:.. they're doped.

And the culture that's doping them is one the artist can help make or break...

Lennon: That's why I'm trying to do in my albums and these interviews - to influence all the people I can influence. All those who arc still under the dream, and just put a big question mark in their mind. The acid dream is over, that is what I'm trying to tell them...

It seems to me that the students are now half-awake enough to try and wake up their brother workers. If you don't pass on your own awareness then it closes down again. That is why the basic need is for the students to get in with the workers and convince them they are not talking gobbledegook. And of course it's difficult to know what the workers are really thinking because the capitalist Press only quotes mouthpieces like Vic Feather anyway.

Women are very important too. We can't have a revolution that doesn't involve and liberate women. It's so subtle the way you're taught male superiority. It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko. She's a red hot liberationist and was quick to show me where I was going wrong, even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That's why I'm always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women.

How do you think we can destroy the capitalist system here in Britain?

I think we must make the workers aware of the really unhappy position they are in, break the dream they are surrounded by. They think they are in a wonderful, free-speaking country, they've got cars and tellies and they don't want to think there's anything more to life, they are prepared to let the bosses run them, to see their children f....d up in school. They're dreaming someone else's dream, it's not even their own. They should realise that the blacks and the Irish are being harassed and repressed and that they will be next. As soon as they start being aware of all that we can really begin to do something. The workers can start to take over.

But we'd also have to infiltrate the army, too, because they are well trained to kill us all. We've got to start all this from where we ourselves are oppressed. I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great.

The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better, but to make them feel worse, to put before them constantly the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.