There is, it is said, inside New York’s famous Dakota Building, if you know where to find it, a small painting affixed to one of the walls. Look closely and you will read: “Nutopia Embassy”. More than 40 years after John Lennon’s death, this is all that remains of what was probably the late Beatle’s strangest idea.
Announced on April Fools’ Day in 1973, some of its elements were clearly tongue-in-cheek, but Lennon’s creation of the whimsical new country of Nutopia—known as “Newtopia” and “without land, without borders, without passports”—had a serious backstory. .
A year earlier, US President Richard Nixon’s administration had begun attempts to deport the pop star turned peace activist as a way to neutralize his high-profile protests against, among other things, the Vietnam War.
Now at a press conference, Lennon, who moved to New York in 1971 with his wife Yoko Ono, tells a group of bemused journalists: “We announce the birth of a conceptual country, Nutopia. Citizenship of a country can be obtained by declaring your awareness of Nutopia. Nutopia has neither land nor Borders, no passports, only people. Nutopia has no laws other than cosmic laws. All residents of Nutopia are ambassadors for the country.”
Then came Lennon’s conclusion: “As ambassadors of Notopia, we demand diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and its people.”
A week ago he had received his last deportation order. Wearing a tight tank top and a blue blazer, Lennon proceeded to hold up a white handkerchief claiming that this was the flag of Nutopia. Then he blew his nose at her.
Backtracking to the previous winter and high on the list of things pressing on Lennon’s mind was the need to get a hit record after the most brutal run of his career.
His album Sometime in New York City, released in 1972, remains arguably the worst record Lennon made as a solo artist or as a Beatle.
It’s a point many Lennon fans have now forgotten, according to Patrick Humphreys, a 1970s NME music journalist who interviewed the Fab Four and is currently writing his own memoir about the group.
“People have a ‘Saint John’ belief where history has been rewritten to show that everything he touched turned to gold. Humphreys insists, but that is not true at all.
“Lennon was in real trouble in 1973. His marriage was falling apart and his records weren’t selling at all. It sounds amazing now, but at the time his solo career was, by far, the least successful of all the ex-Beatles.”
In addition to being pressured by the US authorities who considered him a dangerous extremist, Lennon was desperate to rediscover his magic.
Cue the Nutopia press conference. But what did the media do with the publicity stunt?
The Nutopia Embassy’s official address was named One White Street (John and Yoko’s residence in the Tribeca, New York neighborhood at the time), while the nation’s crudely drawn official seal was of a seal balancing a globe on its nose.
The only element that kept the press audience from believing it was an April Fool’s Day joke—after all, Lennon had always been keen on wordplay, puns, and spoons in his and other writings—was the fact that the press conference was held at the New York City Bar, and with Lennon’s attorney Lyon in attendance. Wilds.
So he was visibly surprised. Speaking four decades later, he admitted: “Yoko came over and apologized to me afterwards. You have to understand that when you represent an artist, we are always unpredictable,” she said.
“The public, especially in the UK, was bored with John and Yoko,” he says. “More interesting music was being released by young artists. Almost everyone in the British music press thought Americans were welcome in John Lennon if they wanted it.”
When Lennon’s new album, Mind Games, was released six months after the bizarre press conference, it was a complete flop, again missing the top ten in the UK, and its songs described by Rolling Stone magazine as “the worst written yet”.
It didn’t help the fact that, at the end of side one, there was a long three-second track of complete silence, called the Nutopian International Anthem.
As for Lennon himself, his split with Yoko, the move to Los Angeles, and a year and a half of drunken debauchery—it was later described as his “wasted weekend.”
The downfall of President Nixon, and the death of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, finally lead to him being granted permanent residence and reuniting with Yoko in 1975.
However, his musical reputation would not truly recover until after he was murdered by Mark Chapman, after seven years in New York City at only 40 years old.
Today, the fictional “micro-state” lives on in the form of a painting in the back entrance of the couple’s Dakota Building apartment, which is still occupied by Yoko. Half a century since the ex-Beatle dreamed of it, all that remains is Notopia.
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