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Yoko: People think that’s the peak, and I’m just so amazed. . . . John’s done all that Beatle stuff. But this new album of John’s is a real peak; that’s higher than any other thing he has done.

John: Thank you, dear.

Do you think it is?

Yeah, sure. I think it’s Sgt. Lennon. I don’t really know how it will sink in, where it will lie in the spectrum of rock & roll and the generation and all the rest of it, but I know what it is. It’s something else, it’s another door.

Do you think the Beatles will record together again?

I record with Yoko, but I’m not going to record with another egomaniac. There is only room for one on an album nowadays. There is no point, there is just no point at all. There was a reason to do it at one time, but there is no reason to do it anymore.

I had a group, I was the singer and the leader; I met Paul, and I made a decision whether to—and he made a decision, too—have him in the group: Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had in, obviously, or not? To make the group stronger or to let me be stronger? That decision was to let Paul in and make the group stronger.

Well, from that, Paul introduced me to George, and Paul and I had to make the decision, or I had to make the decision, whether to let George in. I listened to George play, and I said, “Play ‘Raunchy,’ ” or whatever the old story is, and I let him in. I said, “Okay, you come in”; that was the three of us then. Then the rest of the group was thrown out gradually. It just happened like that; instead of going for the individual thing, we went for the strongest format, and for equals.

George is ten years younger than me, or some shit like that. I couldn’t be bothered with him when he first came around. He used to follow me around like a bloody kid, hanging around all the time. I couldn’t be bothered. He was a kid who played guitar, and he was a friend of Paul’s, which made it all easier. It took me years to come around to him, to start considering him as an equal or anything.

We had all sorts of different drummers all the time, because people who owned drum kits were few and far between; it was an expensive item. They were usually idiots. Then we got Pete Best because we needed a drummer to go to Hamburg the next day. We passed the audition on our own with a stray drummer. There are other myths about Pete Best was the Beatles, and Stuart Sutcliffe’s mother is writing in England that he was the Beatles.

Are you the Beatles?

No, I’m not the Beatles. I’m me. Paul isn’t the Beatles. Brian Epstein wasn’t the Beatles, neither is Dick James. The Beatles are the Beatles. Separately, they are separate. George was a separate individual singer, with his own group as well, before he came in with us, the Rebel Rousers. Nobody is the Beatles. How could they be? We all had our roles to play.

How would you assess George’s talents?

I don’t want to assess him. George has not done his best work yet. His talents have developed over the years, and he was working with two fucking brilliant songwriters, and he learned a lot from us. I wouldn’t have minded being George, the invisible man, and learning what he learned. Maybe it was hard for him sometimes, because Paul and I are such egomaniacs, but that’s the game.

I’m interested in concepts and philosophies. I am not interested in wallpaper, which most music is.

When did you realize that what you were doing transcended . . .

People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine. . . . I always wondered, “Why has nobody discovered me?” In school, didn’t they see that I’m cleverer than anybody in this school? That the teachers are stupid, too? That all they had was information that I didn’t need?

I got fuckin’ lost in being at high school. I used to say to me auntie, “You throw my fuckin’ poetry out, and you’ll regret it when I’m famous,” and she threw the bastard stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a fuckin’ genius or whatever I was, when I was a child.

It was obvious to me. Why didn’t they