‘(Just Like) Starting Over’/’Kiss Kiss Kiss’ was John & Yoko’s first release since their 5 year break from the music business in 1975, it was released as the lead single from their album ‘Double Fantasy‘ on 24 October 1980.

‘‘Starting Over’ and ‘Cleanup Time’ were sorta written on the run after I’d finished all the other work of writing the other ones. They just sort of came. They were like the fun after the work is finished. I was still in Bermuda.’

– John Lennon, 1980

‘We knew that song would be the first single. I love Starting Over, but when I hear it now it just chokes me up a bit because it’s how we felt at the time. We really thought that we were starting over and it didn’t work out that way.’

– Yoko Ono

John: If you listen to the beginning of Double Fantasy, you hear, ‘ping.. ping..ping’, which is the bell that Yoko calls her Wishing Bell. She rings the bell and makes a wish. And I put in on Double Fantasy to show the likeness and the difference of the long, long trip from ‘Mother’ to ‘Starting Over’.

For the first time ever, I sailed across the ocean from Newport to Bermuda. Three thousand miles. Seven days at sea for my first ocean trip. It was supposed to be five days. It took seven. We had three days of storms.

Yoko had sent me there. I’d always talked about sailing, saying I hadn’t even taken lessons. Her attitude was: OK. Put up or shut up!’ And I went! And it was specifically to open up the creativity, but she didn’t tell me that, because she knew on a ‘magical level’ that I would have fought it.

My sailing instructor Tyler Coneys had only sailed coastline sailing like Maine and Long Island before. He’d never been out in the ocean away from land; he’d been out of sight of land but not right out in the ocean. And his two cousins Ellen and Kevin. There were four of us, but only one who had ever been out and navigated an ocean before, Cap’n Hank.

Hank Halsted: Four people showed up on the dock. It was the gang with John, they went, ‘Hello, hello’. I had no idea whatsoever that this John guy was John Lennon.

As we pulled out of Newport, he said, ‘This is good. We’re sailing south east.’ It was an important direction for him in the context of his psychic healing. He hung on Yoko’s every word in that department. He had recently flown to Cape Town to literally ‘get out from under the clouds’ and he pointed to this cloud that we were sailing out from under, saying ‘boy, this is pretty cool, this feels right’.

Tyler Coneys: John and I are on watch and it’s just blue water, crystal clear morning. You look and there’s dolphins swimming, they’re circling us. If you haven’t been to sea that’s kind of a neat thing.

John: The captain was a great guy, Hank. He looked like the man on the Zig-Zag rolling papers, with a beard and the scarf on his head, doing the sextant. When you go out on a yacht, and you’re in the middle of the ocean, you relive all the ocean journeys there ever were – Eric The Viking, Columbus. The experience is incredible.

Hank Halsted: We did all of our navigation by the stars. That was cool, we found, because John would watch me down there working my sights. I think it was the third day I said, ‘Wow, there’s no place like nowhere.’ and John goes, ‘Write that down! Write that down!’ Once you go into the ocean, when you get out to nowhere, you’re on your own.

John: It was the most fantastic experience I had ever had and I loved it! One night when the storm started in the afternoon, it lasted three or four days. A major storm!

Tyler Coneys: It got all grey very suddenly. A group of military ships came by and went around us in a circle and then left, making us wonder what was going on. We were already too far out to go back. Once you’re out in the ocean, you can’t turn back anyway. Then it got real bad. It was the worst storm I was ever in. 65mph winds and twenty-foot seas. You can get bigger waves, but that’s pretty bad in a forty-three foot boat. And everything busted loose from there.

The storm knocked us all apart. It was brutal. The waves were huge. The sea is so big and the boat is so small. We were on twenty degrees of keel. The massive waves were coming up behind like buildings. We’d be surfing down these liquid mountains. I was like, ‘Oh. My. God. I hope we live!’

John: My sailing instructor was sick and so were his two cousins. I blamed it on the food they were eating when they first got on. But also that loss of contact with land is very different from sailing around the coast, even if you can’t see it. You know that it’s just there, but when you’re really out there, you know that there’s no reference point. Wherever you look, you’re in the centre of a circle. That is what it is.

Hank Halsted: One by one, the crew all got seasick, all except for John. So I was pretty well stuck at the helm twenty four hours a day. I got to the point where I knew that I was going to be dangerous and that’s when I looked at John and I said, ‘Hey! Come on up here, big boy. You’ve got to drive this little puppy, ‘cause I gotta go to sleep!’

John: I said, ‘Do you think that I can?’ I was supposed to be the cabin boy learning the trade. And he said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to, aren’t you?’ Everyone else was throwing up and couldn’t move.

Hank Halsted: I let him know that you don’t jibe, you don’t let the wind get across the back-end of the boat because that would cause some other violent changes and we don’t want to deal with that, and I gave him his course. He picked it up fast. His intuition about this kind of stuff was remarkable.

John: So there I was at the wheel with the wind and sea lashing out at me. At first I was terrified but Cap’n Hank was at my side so I felt relatively safe because I knew he wouldn’t let me do anything stupid. I said, ‘You better keep your eye on me.’ He said, ‘I will.’ Five minutes later he goes down and says, ‘OK, see you!’ He went to sleep (laughs).

It was very powerful weather. At first you panic and then you’re ready to throw up your guts. I was in a major storm for six hours driving that boat and keeping it on course. And I was buried under water! I was smashed in the face for six hours! A couple of the waves had me on my knees. I was just hanging on with my hands on the wheel. But I did have the rope around me, to the side.

Tyler Coneys: It looks like a building is coming up behind you and it’s gonna go right over you but then it would lift the boat up and the boat would dig in, or it would come across the deck with huge force. If you weren’t tied in, you would have been swept away.

John: It’s an incredible experience, because it won’t go away. You can’t change your mind. It’s like being on stage, once you’re on, there’s no getting off. Once I accepted the reality of the situation, something greater than me took over and all of a sudden I lost my fear. I actually began to enjoy the experience and I started to shout out old sea shanties in the face of the storm, screaming at the thundering sky. I had the time of my life. I was screaming sea shanties and shouting at the Gods. I felt like a Viking. Jason and the Golden Fleece.

Hank Halsted: I wake up and I sort of peek my head out and I met a different guy. He was totally washed, exuberant, ecstatic. There’s John, one foot on either side of the boat, one hand on each side of the wheel. Very much in command and hollering and singing and acting like a very sane madman.

Tyler Coneys: I think it was one of the happiest moments in his life. He was up there at the helm like a madman on an adventure.

John: Once I got there, I was so centred after the experience at sea that I was tuned in to the cosmos, and all these songs came. I was sitting in the sun and then leaping up and jotting all this down. After I found a place to stay, Sean arrived with the nannies. I had a great time with him, and so did he, and we loved Bermuda. It was beautiful. I really was surprised I’d never discovered it before.