John Lennon's Bermuda

Shortly before his death, John Lennon became the most unlikely of tourists on this coral island and tax haven. What drew him, and why did he stay for two months? In a programme for Radio 4 next week, John McCarthy tells all 

Fairylands is a name that conjures up a dreamy, other-worldly place, somewhere to escape the cares of a busy life. And so it is. Set across two small peninsulas on the island of Bermuda, it is a district of winding lanes through low hills, where homes, some grand, some cottages, sit surrounded by stone walls and green hedges filled with hibiscus blooms. With names such as Xanadu and Windermere, these dwellings have manicured lawns and little letter boxes that are models of the houses themselves. Fairylands is at once magical and twee.

It’s the last place you’d expect, perhaps, to find a right-on rock star with an interest in world peace – but that’s probably why it appealed so much to John Lennon in June 1980. Nor does it necessarily sound like a spot where a man who hasn’t written a song for half a decade is going to rediscover his mojo, and dispel a reputation for reclusiveness. Yet that’s what happened, as I’ll be recounting in a programme for Radio 4 next week, Imagine John Lennon’s Bermuda Adventure.

Lennon stayed for two months and started working intently on new material, including, Starting Over, Watching the Wheels and Woman, with which he would return to the recording studios and plan to take on the road with a band. He didn’t get the chance to perform again: he was shot dead outside his apartment block in New York on December 8 that year. But he did release an album, Double Fantasy with Yoko Ono, the month before his murder. Other songs recorded with his wife went to make up the posthumous album Milk and Honey.

Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is that Lennon arrived at Bermuda on a yacht, having sailed 700 miles from the United States. John Lennon, working-class hero, as yachtsman? Who would have thought it?