It was the result of an all-night session of musical experimentation with Yoko in John's home studio at Kenwood, while his wife, Cynthia Lennon, was on holiday in Greece.
[11] Two years later, Cynthia Lennon, feeling miserable and increasingly distanced from her husband,[12] decided to go on holiday[13][14] to Greece with her friends Jenny Boyd and Magic Alex.
[12] The genesis of the album came about when Yoko expressed an interest in John's avant-garde home recordings[15] after he had asked "Do you want to hear some of the things I've been playing around at in my studio?
[14][18] Cynthia returned home unexpectedly the next day to find them sitting cross-legged on the floor in matching white robes, staring into each other's eyes.
[19][21][22] Both of them had experience in avant-garde music: Ono had staged various multimedia events in New York during the early 1960s, and Lennon had worked on audio experimentation in the Beatles.
[23] Lennon's longtime friend Peter Shotton recalled later in his memoir that many of the loops heard on the album were made by John and himself in the days before the recording.
[25] Lennon talked about making the album and Ono's influence on him, in an interview in 1980 with Playboy's David Sheff: "Well, after Yoko and I met, I didn't realize I was in love with her.
[22] Lennon and Ono used a time-delay camera, which was set up by Tony Bramwell, to take nude photographs of themselves for the album's cover: these were taken at 34 Montagu Square,[25] in early October 1968.
[27] Neil Aspinall recalled that Lennon gave the roll of film to an Apple employee called Jeremy, with instructions to develop the photographs.
[20] The album's title arose from the couple's feeling that they were "two innocents, lost in a world gone mad", and because after making the recording, the pair consummated their relationship.
"[31] Ono viewed the cover as a significant declaration: "I was in the artistic community, where a painter did a thing about rolling a naked woman with blue paint on her body on a canvas; ... that was going on at the time.
[27] It took Lennon six months to persuade his fellow band members to agree to the release of the album, and despite not approving of the front cover, Paul McCartney[15] was asked to provide a note for it which read: "When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience.
One edition on the Rock Classics label,[nb 5] which was released in January 1993,[15] claimed to be distributed by Tetragrammaton (which was defunct by 1970) and not mastered from the original tape, but was merely transferred from a copy of the record with audible surface noise.
[41] The fake-stereo mix of the album was officially re-issued on Rykodisc on 3 June 1997,[nb 6] under the observation of Ono,[15] with an additional bonus track—"Give Peace a Chance"'s B-side "Remember Love".
[nb 7][44][45] In a retrospective assessment, William Ruhlmann of AllMusic remarked that it was "not unlike what you might get if you turned on a tape recorder for a random half-hour in your home", calling the music "naked".
[35] More favourable, Pitchfork reviewer Seth Colter Walls considered the album the "fascinating" product "of a first date", while noting "it has plenty of competition" with other Fluxus-inspired sound artefacts from the era.