8 December 2025

The story of John Lennon’s bloodied glasses

The “very very mild” album cover that shocked the world

Art or exploitation? Spine-chilling or crass? This is the cover for Season of Glass, the album Yoko Ono brought out a few months after John Lennon’s assassination on 8 December 1980. They are his glasses, removed from his body by the concierge worker Jay Hastings after he’d ripped open his shirt: and that is a view from the seventh floor of the Dakota building in which he lived, and was shot.

The cover passed me by until very recently: no one I showed it to among my acquaintance, millennial to boomer, remembered it – apart from the music journalists who were around at the time, one of whom said, “I know, ghastly isn’t it!” It was a deeply unpopular gesture – even the label asked her to change it – because Ono was deeply unpopular: it was further evidence, for some, of a career cashing in on her relationship with John. The picture was, she said, a very, very mild expression of what she had seen: but the revulsion was down to the sense of ownership people felt over Lennon – the same force that makes people seek someone to blame.

It was an eventful day: the sort of day that would only occur in the hyperreal, overpacked narrative of a rock biopic. The couple spent several hours with Annie Leibowitz at their apartment, shooting the famous cover for Rolling Stone magazine: he climbed her like a tree frog while she refused to take off her clothes. They did their last ever radio interview, the audio of which is currently being made into an experimental movie by Steven Soderbergh with a pioneering use of AI. Then they went to the studio for a while; then they went back home.

It is somehow hard to imagine Ono using any phrase as prosaic as “glass half full” or “glass half empty”, and whether that is what she hoped to evoke with the water in her image, who can say. But it is a nice symbol for an ambiguous phase in the life of Lennon, a noted cynic who, by all accounts, was in a happy place when he was shot, moving comfortably into his forties. It turned out to be her highest selling album to date.