“Finally made the plane into Paris
Honeymooning down by the Seine
Peter Brown called to say
You can make it OK
You can get married in Gibraltar near Spain.”
Oh, that it had been so simple…Honeymooning down by the Seine
Peter Brown called to say
You can make it OK
You can get married in Gibraltar near Spain.”
Paul and Linda got married on 12 March 1969 and two days later John
and Yoko flew to Paris with the intention of marrying. A few days
earlier on their way to Poole in Dorset John and Yoko had gone via
Southampton to enquire whether it would be possible for them to be
married on a cross-channel ferry. According to John, “That was the
romantic part: when we went to Southampton and then we couldn’t get on
because she wasn’t English and she couldn’t get the day visa to go
across. And they said, ‘Anyway, you can’t get married. The Captain’s not
allowed to do it any more.”
Undeterred John and Yoko decided they would get married in Paris and
so they chartered an aircraft and flew to the French capital on 16
March. Unfortunately the authorities refused them permission, for the
simple reason that they had not lived in France long enough!
Undeterred they charted another aircraft a few days later and flew to
Gibraltar. As John later said, “We were calling Peter Brown [he worked
for Apple], and said, ‘We want to get married. Where can we go?’ And he
called back and said, ‘Gibraltar’s the only place.’ So – ‘OK, let’s go!’
And we went there and it was beautiful. It’s the Pillar of Hercules,
and also symbolically they called it the End of the World at one period.
There’s some name besides Pillar of Hercules – but they thought the
world outside was a mystery from there, so it was like the Gateway to
the World. So we liked it in the symbolic sense, and the Rock foundation
of our relationship.”
Their wedding day was 20 March 1969 and within an hour of getting
married John and Yoko flew back to Paris where they stayed at the Plaza
Athénée,
On 25 March John and Yoko were driven from Paris to Amsterdam where
they booked into The Hilton Hotel and in room 702 (it’s been renumbered
902 in recent times) they began their bed-in for peace. They stayed
there for 7 days and left on 31 March to fly to Vienna where they held a
press conference from inside a white bag. John and Yoko were the most
famous couple on the planet, in an age when media coverage was much less
global, for the two weeks following their wedding they were everywhere!
On their second wedding anniversary John’s fourth solo single, ‘Power To
the People’ first entered the UK singles best seller’s list, eventually
climbing to #7 on the chart. In America the record came out on 22 March
and it made the Hot 100 on 3 April and climbed to No.11 shortly
afterwards.
For the 30th anniversary of their wedding, Gibraltar issued postage
stamps of John and Yoko reminding the world of the most famous wedding
ever to have been held on the famous rock.
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