EastWest Review
Established New York 2018
Collage by Asker Mursaliev for Soviet History Lessons. Photograph of Nicky Hopkins by Elly Beitema / TopPhoto.
LENNON'S IMAGINE :
THE ERA, THE PIANO OF NICKY HOPKINS,
AND A DREAM TURNED PARADOX
by Alissa Ordabai
Imagine, John Lennon’s second solo album, was revealed to the world in September 1971. And swiftly became mythologized — as both a manifesto and an artifact of his inner conflicts. Once the charismatic provocateur of a band which seemingly embodied harmony itself, he was now navigating independence and self-reinvention. And it was no easy march. The year before, Geoffrey Cannon, writing in the Guardian about Lennon’s first solo record John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, summed up the prevailing reaction among the critics to the ex-Beatle’s metamorphosis: “He screams and cries, desolation, bitterness, anguish. ... This is declamation, not music.”
It was, of course, true music — real and unfiltered. But, for all its authenticity, perhaps not the sort you’d find yourself returning to time and again.
That Lennon’s second album came out more convincing and more even in its stride, is inseparable from the contributions of the pianist Nicky Hopkins. He brought with him that balance, that sense of completeness, which elevated each track — save for the title song and "It's So Hard" which he did not play on — with a fullness and a clarity only a man of his background could provide.
It would, perhaps, be no exaggeration to say that Hopkins was somewhat of a British national treasure. He started out as a child prodigy who won a scholarship to one of Britain's most prestigious conservatoires, the Royal Academy of Music, where he received a classical education. In 1968, he declined an invitation to join Led Zeppelin — a decision that might have defined another man — but Hopkins was already carving a path as the most sought-after session musician on both sides of the Atlantic. By the time he took part in the making of Imagine, his résumé was nothing short of staggering: four Rolling Stones releases, albums with Jeff Beck, Jefferson Airplane, the Kinks, and the Who, and a performance at Woodstock. His name may not have been in lights, but his fingerprints were all over the music that defined the era.
Hopkins was a distinctively English character — unassuming but transformative to the music of those he worked with. He was a living reminder of what England could be at its best: brilliant but not brash, capable of profound emotion but disciplined. He played with amplitude and clarity, and had a unique ability to refract and magnify the light of others without overshadowing them. What he brought to the table transcended the chaos of the Seventies and the Sixties rock scene: it was structured but free — in many ways in keeping with England’s best artistic traditions.
On “Jealous Guy,” his favorite track on Imagine, Hopkins reaches into emotional depth rock as a genre can't go to on its own. But he takes it there — not with flash or force, but drawing on the understanding of something older, as a musician who knows the language of Chopin and Brahms.
His playing here is remarkably subtle — light and gentle, almost a meditation, but gaining more weight as the emotional stakes rise. And what’s most exciting is the way he pulls at the tempo: stretching and slowing it down, turning it into something akin to human breath.
He never overplays, but the simplicity of his piano is an illusion. It is his restraint, his elegance of withholding, that lifts up the song beyond trends and fashions. And it does more than accompany Lennon — it tells the story together with him, making the track one of the most memorable ballads of the Seventies.
Artwork by Asker Mursaliev for Soviet History Lessons.
That Hopkins played on every song on Imagine except for the title track, feels like the hand of fate at work — an unseen force that sometimes understands more about what belongs and what doesn’t in our lives and in history. For the youth of the West, Lennon’s slogans — "Imagine no possessions," "No religion," "No countries" — rang out like a fresh promise and a rebellion of sorts. But behind the Iron Curtain his words fell flat, strange and out of step with the hard truths of lived reality. And by that time, the voices of those who resisted communist authoritarianism in Eastern Europe were becoming too loud to ignore, pressing in on a world that was no longer so separate.
The release of Imagine on September 9, 1971 coincided with a world in flux, and not always in harmony with the ideals Lennon extolled. Just a year earlier, CBS aired an interview with Russian underground writers Vladimir Bukovsky and Andrei Amalrik, the first voices of Soviet dissent to be heard in the West. And their testimonies exposed a grim reality: the USSR’s use of punitive psychiatry to silence human rights activists, torture in its prisons and labor camps, the grinding poverty of the Soviet working class, and the ruthless persecution of religious believers.
They spoke of the plight of those fighting to preserve their identities — Jews, Crimean Tatars, and other peoples displaced and dispossessed by the Soviet regime. Against this backdrop, Lennon’s utopian aspirations for a world where there'd be “no countries” or “no religion” struck a discordant note. Because for those resisting authoritarianism behind the Iron Curtain, it was precisely their faith, culture, and national identity that held them strong, anchoring their struggle for self-determination. “A freedom which does not include the freedom to be significantly different is no freedom at all,” wrote Natan Sharansky, the hero of Soviet Jewish anti-communist resistance in his book Defending Identity. “If Europeans have nothing to die for, nothing worth fighting for, then they are doomed.”
The broadcast of William Cole's interview with Bukovsky and Amalrik unleashed a cascade of repercussions. Cole, the head of the CBS Moscow bureau, was expelled from the USSR, while Bukovsky and Amalrik went on trial for "anti-Soviet activities." For Cole and his family, the fallout was personal as well as professional. His wife, Rose-Marie Debecker, endured profound stress during their deportation, and suffered a miscarriage that left her with lasting health complications. Reflecting on those events in a 2022 interview to this magazine, Rose-Marie shared her late husband’s admiration for the two dissidents. “I have never seen people braver than them. Physically brave. They knew the repressive machine would destroy them, but they still spoke loudly, clearly, and openly.” And her husband, she noted, understood what courage was. “He served on the front during World War II.”
After Bukovsky’s arrest in March 1971 and his sentencing in January 1972 to 12 years of imprisonment for exposing the USSR's systematic political abuse of psychiatry, a constellation of Western artists and intellectuals mobilized in his defense and against the Soviet practice of putting dissenters into mental asylums: Iris Murdoch, Arthur Koestler, Yehudi Menuhin, Vanessa Redgrave, Dustin Hoffman, Vladimir Nabokov, Tom Stoppard, Alan Clarke, and Joan Baez to name a few. Yet, despite Lennon’s desire to tour Russia, he never acknowledged either the campaign, or the grim Soviet realities. With time, the question of why has become not only unanswerable but irrelevant — a silence that does not linger because his death has rendered it unbridgeable.
* * *
But there is another facet to consider in Hopkins’ absence from the title song of the album. He was a man of religious conviction, whose faith in God was no abstract belief but a personal anchor, sustaining him through a lifetime marked by Crohn’s disease — the illness which was cruel, demanding hospitalizations and surgeries, leaving him to grapple daily with pain and a tiredness. So it seems providential that he is absent on “Imagine,” and that fate allowed him to retain his independence, leaving his talent free of ideological baggage.
It is also true that as a man of faith Hopkins not only took part in the recording of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," but was the one who transformed the piece, weaving Jagger’s and Richards’s disparate ideas into a cohesive whole. Hopkins, of course, understood that the Stones did not advocate for evil; that the song was a metaphor, a commentary. The one which, among other things, conveyed one particular idea: that the Russian Revolution was the work of the devil.
Hopkins started on Imagine in the spring 1971, taking a break from the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street sessions at Villa Nellcôte in the sun-baked south of France. That summer, the villa was alive with its own kind of chaos — music, parties, and the ebb and flow of people coming and going. Amid it all, Lennon had been calling, time and again, leaving messages for Hopkins. He wanted him to join the Plastic Ono Band on tour. But in the whirl of life at the villa, those messages went unnoticed. When they finally did reach him, Hopkins was seething — angry that Lennon’s invitations had been left to languish. Without hesitation, he stepped away from the Stones and traveled back to England. There, at Tittenhurst Park, Lennon’s estate in Berkshire, the two met again. It wasn’t their first meeting — they’d crossed paths during the Beatles sessions in 1968.
It is not difficult to see why Lennon continued to call Hopkins. He saw in him something rare — a depth that came from surviving. Fourteen surgeries in his early youth, and the pain and illness that gnawed at him daily — this carved Hopkins into a man who knew more, felt more, and endured more than most. Lennon needed that. He needed a musician who could reach into the raw places where his own pain lived — the loss of his mother, the absence of a father, the unraveling of the Beatles.
And Lennon knew that while Hopkins was a virtuoso, he was more than that — he was an artist as real as the weight he carried. His playing was rich, layered, and authentic, without a trace of superficial sheen. And Lennon knew that true luxury wasn’t in flash, but in something deeper: sophistication, but also the kind of truth that only comes from lived experience.
The atmosphere in Lennon’s studio stood in stark contrast to the chaotic and improvisational energy of the Rolling Stones’ Villa Nellcôte. Here, there was no Anita Pallenberg — no envoy of chaos to ignite the air. Instead, the hostess was Yoko Ono, whose authority extended beyond mere participation and who, as Hopkins’ first wife Lynda recalled, managed not only the creative process but also, it seemed, Lennon himself. The contrast between Ono and Pallenberg also reflected a deeper juxtaposition: one was the living embodiment of generations of European bohemia, and the other came from a lineage of samurai fighting men. And Lynda’s discomfort at Tittenhurst was a reaction to the negotiations of taste, influence, and control within Lennon’s studio, which at times felt less like a creative space and more like a chessboard.
But if Yoko’s interventions could provoke bassist Klaus Voormann, pushing him to the edge of walking away — only for Lennon to draw him back — Hopkins remained composed. He was, of course, a rebel; it was almost a prerequisite for a rock musician in those days. But his rebellion was not of the noisy variety. There was a discipline to how he approached these sessions, a precision in his work that spoke of years spent in rigorous classical training. The conservatoire had taught him more than music; it had imparted a habit of self-command that seemed, somehow, to echo the values of a more decorous age. He understood that Yoko and John had invited him for a reason, and he respected them. But his respect didn’t translate into unnecessary reverence. In the evenings, when the sessions ended, Nicky and Lynda would leave, unlike other musicians who would stay to hang out.
Producer Phil Spector arrived at the inaugural Imagine session dressed in suit and tie — an almost surreal contrast to the informality of the rock world of the time. There was a toughness about him that seemed to double down on the already taut atmosphere Yoko was orchestrating. If Nellcôte had been the gilded temple of rock 'n' roll’s indulgence where the night never seemed to end, then Tittenhurst was its opposite. Here, under Yoko’s command, even lighting a joint was verboten, and at one moment she attempted to even extinguish improvisation, as though spontaneity itself was an affront to her control.
In retrospect, it is unsettling to watch archival footage of Spector and Lennon working together in the studio, knowing that one of them would later end up being the victim of an assassin's bullet, and the other would fire a gun himself, killing a woman he would invite to his house. And to realize that at times life unravels in ways no amount of genius can prevent.
* * *
In 1971 Hopkins found himself contributing to two iconic albums — Lennon's Imagine and the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. He worked on them almost simultaneously and wove the same golden thread into two entirely different worldviews. If on Lennon’s “Oh My Love” he sounds as delicate as the first light of dawn — each note a caress — then on tracks such as “How Do You Sleep” and “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier,” his piano turns dark, giving an extra dimension to Lennon's storm. These moments — ominous, cutting — were precisely what Lennon wanted when he persistently dialed Nellcôte.
The faintest echoes of Exile on Main Street linger in “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier,” like a memory half-recalled. Listen closely: place the isolated piano track of the song, now available on YouTube, alongside the version of “Shine a Light” from Hopkins' private collection, also waiting there to be discovered. Though it's Billy Preston’s keyboard that you will hear on "Shine a Light," you will also pick up faint reflections of the song which have wandered into "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier."
And “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier” is where Hopkins shows what a remarkable improviser he really is, unconstrained by the melody or by the harmonic progression. Instead, he unfolds a fluid process, with cascading streams of notes and rich, blues-inflected chords challenging you to embrace constant change, refusing to settle into repetition or to find a resolution. It sounds almost avant-garde: the way he introduces subtle dissonance, occasionally hitting unexpected chords or conflicting notes. His playing here is still rooted in the traditions of blues and gospel, but he takes these styles and distorts them, pushing boundaries. And you hear not only improvisation, but a broader cultural dialogue — a dialogue about innovation, tradition, and the spaces where they intersect.
But what is particularly remarkable is that despite its unpredictable and exploratory nature, Hopkins' playing becomes the unifying force. This dual role — of embracing chaos while simultaneously providing structure — shows the depth of his artistry.
When Ringo Starr attended a session for “How Do You Sleep,” he reportedly winced at the lyrics when he realized they were directed at McCartney, saying, “That's enough, John.” Yet Hopkins’ calm, by contrast, seemed to resonate with a deeper understanding of human relationships. It’s as if through his playing he was offering Lennon an unspoken message: that it is not only okay to be complicated, but that complexity could be a path to harmony.
Nicky’s open nature was, in many ways, his greatest strength. It gave him both the courage to stay unguarded and the insight to recognize brokenness in others. His playing reflects this, offering a counterpoint to the sharpness in Lennon’s lyrics. And even when Lennon swore in frustration during the sessions, Hopkins remained unperturbed.
The drive in this song comes from his playing which not only strengthens the rhythm, but isn’t afraid to increase the tension. It is he who transforms “How Do You Sleep” into more than just a diss track — he makes it a multi-dimensional piece of music, taking it beyond antagonism. His piano reframes the song, turning it from an act of bitterness into an exploration of tension, contradiction, and the capacity of music to hold within it the complexity of what it’s like to be human.
To mourn Nicky Hopkins, who departed this earth too soon in 1994, is to mourn not only the man but what he represented. His loss is entwined with the vanishing of a world capable of shaping such a singular figure — a world where decorum still lived among the shifting values and cultural upheaval. Hopkins was both the participant of these absurd times but also their counterpoint, embodying the very qualities that England seemed to need most in the Sixties and the Seventies, but so often overlooked.
In an age increasingly dominated by brash personalities and egotism — whether in the arts, music, or politics — Hopkins stood apart. He was deeply human, profoundly attuned to the contradictions of the world around him. But even within Lennon’s orbit, itself a microcosm of those contradictions, Hopkins brought poise that seemed to hover above the proceedings. To remember him is to remember not only his artistry but a fleeting glimpse of what might have been preserved in our culture.
* * *
In September of 1971, after Imagine was completed, Lennon began drafting a letter to Eric Clapton, an invitation to join him in forming a new group in which he envisioned Hopkins taking part too. He promised camaraderie not just of musicians, and wrote that the wives would find themselves warmly welcomed too, with Yoko Ono already devising ways to engage them. He had concerts in Russia and China in mind, dreaming of spanning not only geographical ground but ideologies too.
This utopia never passed beyond the realm of the imagined, but you can't help but entertain the thought, however amusing and improbable, of Lennon and his rock star companions embarking on a tour of Russia in the early Seventies, attempting to navigate Soviet censorship. The Soviet authorities, ever vigilant against cultural infiltration, at the time viewed rock music with overt hostility. Western bands did not get airplay in the USSR, their releases were absent from stores, and they themselves were personas non grata, frequently vilified in the Soviet press. Even those rare exceptions among the Western classical musicians who were allowed to tour the Soviet Union in that era, faced rigid control.
Michael Lorimer, a classical guitarist, a fellow New Yorker, and disciple of Andrés Segovia, recounted in a 2011 interview to this writer the stifling regulations which governed his recitals in Russia in 1975. Under the auspices of Gosconcert, the Soviet Ministry of Culture's live music division, he was required to submit in advance a verbatim script of any remarks he intended to address to his audience. Only upon receiving official approval could he proceed. Yet, the translator would still distort his words. “Where I said black,” Lorimer recalled with a laugh, “they said white.” And this epitomized the Soviet state’s relentless efforts to mold foreign cultural expression to suit is ideology. How Lennon, Hopkins, or Clapton could have fared under such conditions is a question of absurdist speculation.
"Imagine," however, was rolled out in the context of Russia in 2022, weeks after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that February. Lennon's son Julian, joined by guitar virtuoso Nuno Bettencourt — a man also familiar with our collective frailty ("Why humans are broken?" he once said to me in an interview in 2010 when I asked him what he would want to know if the universe could provide him with one true answer) — performed the song as a plea for peace. But those driving the invasion paid it no mind, and for Ukrainians, the message was distant, even irrelevant. Today their resistance exemplifies the necessity of borders and possessions in preserving identity and survival. “No countries" offers no solution, only the specter of erasure.
* * *
Lennon’s assassin would later say that part of what drove him to murder was a sense of contradiction between the lyrics of “Imagine” with its dreamy notions of a world without possessions and the opulence Lennon himself lived in. To Chapman, it made Lennon seem like a fraud, preaching one life while luxuriating in another. "He told us to imagine no possessions and there he was, with millions of dollars and yachts and farms and country estates, laughing at people like me who had believed the lies and bought the records and built a big part of their lives around his music." It was a bitter irony, twisted into violence — a judgment passed by a mind too obsessed by celebrity to see the humanity beneath the contradiction.
Nicky Hopkins regarded John Lennon without affectation. There was no sycophantic yearning, no ambition to bask in the glow of Lennon’s fame or linger in his company beyond the hours demanded by their work. To him, Lennon was a fellow musician, a fellow countryman, a spirit shaped by the same winds of their generation — skeptical of authority, wary of the narratives spun by the establishment. In Lennon, Hopkins saw not a gilded icon, but the man himself. The man who had the courage to show his wounds to the world, singing without bravado — about jealousy, trauma, fear, and love all laid bare. If only the world could borrow Nicky Hopkins’ eyes, the kind that looked at Lennon without worship — seeing the man as he was, then maybe our planet would become a more peaceful place.
Every country in Europe has its noble side, its moments of golden exaltation. But there is a particular sadness in the realization that England no longer produces men like Nicky Hopkins. He embodied the very essence of what made English culture distinct — both its rebellious spirit and its reverence for tradition. And he did so with elegance that seemed effortless, with a depth of feeling that could not be feigned.
Such things are not easily reclaimed. Cultures shift, values evolve, and the world, in its forward motion, often buries what is most precious beneath the detritus of progress. To hear Nicky Hopkins play is not merely to hear music; it is to catch the faint reflection of a world that once felt so real, so full of promise. But the England he came from is no longer a place of nostalgia — it is something that cannot be replaced.
Hopkins would later go on to record his own music, and to play on hundreds more of defining albums of the era. And while some of his most recognized session work remains on Lennon’s Imagine, in the end, he was not merely a session musician on this album, not just a virtuoso; he was a mirror, the man who gave Lennon’s vision weight and dimension. To listen to his playing on Imagine is to be reminded that even in the chaos of creation, there can be grace. And in that grace there is a lesson: that the most enduring contributions are often those made with humility, not fanfare. As the world changes and the England that shaped Hopkins fades further into memory, he remains — not simply a legacy of what once was, but a symbol of what art can still aspire to be, outside of ideologies, fashions, or confines of a certain era.
Links:
Nicky Hopkins' isolated piano on "Jealous Guy": https://youtu.be/TVx7bqYWJzQ?si=RhVzrzpREkrmgw7D
Nicky Hopkins' isolated piano on "Oh My Love": https://youtu.be/hAJd_0rQG8A?si=kX_aQNpzxQD5ka6l
Nicky Hopkins' isolated piano on "How Do You Sleep": https://youtu.be/ogMyYhKqPGM?si=TC56U9fgWoSIqgtz
Nicky Hopkins' isolated piano on "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier": https://youtu.be/9T3L3ATXeiQ?si=uEWbt6iFYZDJsYOK
Version of the Rolling Stones' "Shine a Light" from Nicky Hopkins' collection: https://youtu.be/TOVPrb4Rjt8?si=DCszB4ziPfaxBsvc
John Lennon and Nicky Hopkins working on "How Do You Sleep": https://youtu.be/FoJQAyrUHhA?si=w8h2fAZMmnR1miJN
Mick Jagger and Nicky Hopkins working on "Sympathy for the Devil": https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LQyw8Nk6DwY
Nicky Hopkins' isolated piano on "Sympathy for the Devil": https://youtu.be/K7dtk0m_FUA?si=qLOlXJ2g1VBIlCLr
Watch the newly released Nicky Hopkins documentary The Session Man on Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0DBPKT9K7/
Nicky Hopkins biography by Julian Dawson: https://shorturl.at/MgFVC