JOHN LENNON FOUND HIS VOICE IN BERMUDA
In 1980, after five years away from music, John Lennon sailed to Bermuda and found the inspiration he thought he had lost. The island’s quiet beauty, coupled with a transformative Atlantic crossing, sparked the creative revival that became Double Fantasy.
Bermuda has always outperformed its size, drawing an unlikely share of the extraordinary.
Mark Twain returned so often in his later years that he called it his second home, and wrote from here, near the end of his life, that he would sooner stay than go to heaven. Eugene O’Neill kept a house on the island, where his daughter Oona was born. Georgia O’Keeffe came to convalesce, Albert Einstein to file his American residency papers at the nearest consulate, Winston Churchill passed through in wartime, and in more recent decades David Bowie kept a home on the island, as Michael Douglas and his family have for years. Bermuda has never made much noise about any of them. That restraint is part of why they came.
But of all the people who found their way here, the one whose visit left the deepest mark stayed only a few months, arrived half by accident, and was not entirely sure he was still an artist when he came.
Five Years of Silence
By the summer of 1980, John Lennon had not released an album in half a decade. Following the birth of his son Sean in 1975, he had stepped away from music almost entirely, content to raise a child and let the work sit. The occasional demo aside, the songs had stopped coming, and with them a certain confidence. Encouraged to travel, he settled on an idea that had little to do with recording and everything to do with a boyhood dream: he would go to sea.
On the 5th of June 1980 he left Newport, Rhode Island aboard the Megan Jaye, a forty-three-foot sloop, bound for Bermuda. He brought a small crew and only a novice’s experience of the open sea. It was roughly seven hundred miles of open Atlantic, and it did not stay calm.
The Storm
A few days out, the boat met a violent mid-Atlantic storm. Twenty-foot waves came over the deck, and one by one the crew were taken down by seasickness until only the captain and Lennon were left able to stand. When the captain finally had to rest, he handed the wheel to the least experienced man aboard.
By Lennon’s own account, given later, he was terrified at first, alone at the helm with the sea coming at him and spray streaming off his glasses. Then something shifted. The fear gave way, and for hours he held the boat on course through the weather, shouting old sea shanties and Liverpool ballads into the storm. He described coming off the water feeling cleared out and wide open, as though every song he had not written for five years had been waiting on the other side of it.
“Well, they shake their heads and they look at me, as if I’ve lost my mind
I tell them there’s no hurry, I’m just sitting here doing time
I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round”
-Watching the Wheels, John Lennon
A Different Kind of Business Aircraft
There Is No Place Like Nowhere
The Megan Jaye sailed into St. George’s Harbour on the 11th of June. Before he left the boat, Lennon wrote a line in the logbook that has outlived almost everything else said about the crossing: “there is no place like nowhere.” He rented a house in the quiet Fairylands district and settled in for what became a stay of roughly two months.
The rest was not idleness. The muse that had gone missing for five years returned almost at once, and the songs arrived in a rush. With an acoustic guitar and a pair of cassette recorders, he laid the songs down as rough demos on the island, much of the material that would become his next album, conceived as a conversation between himself and Yoko Ono.
THE FLOWER IN THE GARDEN
The record found its name in Bermuda too. Walking through the Bermuda Botanical Gardens, Lennon came across a freesia labelled with a single phrase that struck him as a perfect description of his marriage and of the album taking shape. He kept it. The record became Double Fantasy, named for a flower on a small plaque in a garden on the island.
It is a quiet detail, and a very Bermudian one. The island did not hand him a grand revelation. It handed him a walk in a garden, a name on a plaque, and the room to notice it
