John Lennon and Yoko Ono
– and ushered in the age of celebrity
John Lennon and Yoko Ono are staying in bed to protest against war. It is 1969, and the conflict in question is Vietnam. They've just got married. The protest is also their honeymoon – and they drag it out, staging two "bed-ins" at hotels in Amsterdam and Montreal. Inviting the media to witness their recumbent defiance, they abolish the difference between the public and the private.
This, in my view, is the iconic image of the second Elizabethan era: it captures so much that changed during her reign. When Elizabeth was young, men of all classes wore hats as a matter of politeness. Other habits were equally staid: when British soldiers were fighting Japan in Burma in the 1940s, they were disadvantaged because they refused to try the local rice, and would only eat canned "British" food. This picture, taken a little less than 20 years into Elizabeth's reign, shows how the cultural revolution of the 1960s transformed life in ways that are still being worked out today.
By 1969, Britain had travelled a long way from bowler-hatted repression: the country was high not just on drugs and love, but on the medium and the message. The Beatles led an outburst of feeling and free expression. Here, Lennon and Ono sum up the decade's assault on tradition. Newlyweds, they let cameras into their bedroom. They probably didn't know, however, all they were implying by this. As stars, they have allowed the media and their fans total access: the po-faced decencies of 1953 have given way to complete self-exposure as these celebrities treat themselves as public property.
It is an outrageous act of communication - and viewing this moment from the vantage point of 2012, in the 60th year of the second Elizabethan age, we can see a continuity with the cultural revolution we are experiencing today. What exploded in the reign of Elizabeth Windsor was the power of human beings to communicate with one another. And yes, Britain led the way with its 1960s conquest of global popular culture. Pop music was above all a freeing-up of words and gestures, its emotive messages sped by the new availability of records, tapes and transistor radios. Lennon saw clearer than any other star how this could become both a form of political campaigning and obliterate all distance between celebrities and the public.
This photograph is a visual tweet: Lennon and Ono open themselves to the world in the same way everyone is now doing on Twitter and Facebook. Lennon was to experience the dark side of fame – shot dead just because he was a celebrity. But in this picture, the utopian promise of the new Elizabethan age is laid bare: everything and everybody, here and now, together.
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