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Danes auction unknown recording of John Lennon on 1970 visit

A 1970 audio recording of John Lennon singing a hitherto unpublished song during a visit to Denmark will go under the hammer in Copenhagen on September 28th, the auction house said Tuesday.

Danes auction unknown recording of John Lennon on 1970 visit
File photo: Ritzau Scanpix

The asking price for the 33-minute recording has been estimated at between 27,000 and 40,000 euros.

It has been put up for sale by four men who were teenagers when they met The Beatles’ singer, who was spending part of the 1969-1970 winter in a small town on Denmark’s west coast.

“The tape is totally unique because it’s a conversation. It took place after a press conference with the four schoolboys and some journalists, and John Lennon plays a few songs for them,” Alexa Bruun Rasmussen of the Bruun Rasmussen auction house told AFP.

“One of them, ‘Radio Peace’, has never been published,” she said.

“It’s a little piece of Danish history and when we listen to it, we can sense that John Lennon felt cosy in Denmark. He could be left alone and just be,” she said.

At the end of December 1969, Lennon visited Denmark with Yoko Ono to spend time with Ono’s daughter from another relationship, Kyoko, who was living with her father in northern Jutland at the time.

The visit, which lasted several weeks, went largely unnoticed at first. But once his presence was discovered, the star called a press conference. 

Due to a series of unforeseeable events and bad weather, the four high school students ended up interviewing Lennon after the press conference, in an informal setting.

“I believe they were experiencing ‘hygge’,” the currently on-trend Danish art de vivre of making everyday life cosy and convivial, joked Bruun Rasmussen.

READ ALSO: It’s official: ‘hygge’ is now an English word

During the interview, conducted just months before The Beatles broke up, the teens were mainly interested in Lennon’s peace activism.

“With the auction, they want to pass on the message John Lennon stood for,” Bruun Rasmussen said.

She noted the “old-fashioned” charm of the recording, which is being sold with photos of the meeting and the issue of the school newspaper featuring the interview.

“To listen to the 33 minutes of the tape you need an old-fashioned cassette player and I guess that nostalgia part will add to its value.”

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FEATURE

Greenland foreign minister axed over independence remarks

Greenland's pro-independence foreign minister Pele Broberg was demoted on Monday after saying that only Inuits should vote in a referendum on whether the Arctic territory should break away from Denmark.

Greenland foreign minister axed over independence remarks
Greenland's pro-independence minister Pele Broberg (far R) with Prime Minister Mute Egede (2nd R), Danish foreign minister Jeppe Kofod and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (2nd R) at a press briefing in Greenland in May 2021. Photo: Ólafur Steinar Rye Gestsson/Ritzau Scanpix

Prime Minister Mute Egede, who favours autonomy but not independence, said the ruling coalition had agreed to a reshuffle after a controversial interview by the minister of the autonomous Arctic territory.

Broberg was named business and trade minister and Egede will take on the foreign affairs portfolio.

The prime minister, who took power in April after a snap election, underscored that “all citizens in Greenland have equal rights” in a swipe at Broberg.

Broberg in an interview to Danish newspaper Berlingske said he wanted to reserve voting in any future referendum on independence to Inuits, who comprise more than 90 percent of Greenland’s 56,000 habitants.

“The idea is not to allow those who colonised the country to decide whether they can remain or not,” he had said.

In the same interview he said he was opposed to the term the “Community of the Kingdom” which officially designates Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, saying his country had “little to do” with Denmark.

Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953 and became a semi-autonomous territory in 1979.

The Arctic territory is still very dependent on Copenhagen’s subsidies of around 526 million euros ($638 million), accounting for about a third of its budget.

But its geostrategic location and massive mineral reserves have raised international interest in recent years, as evidenced by former US president Donald Trump’s swiftly rebuffed offer to buy it in 2019.

READ ALSO: US no longer wants to buy Greenland, Secretary of State confirms

Though Mute Egede won the election in April by campaigning against a controversial uranium mining project, Greenland plans to expand its economy by developing its fishing, mining and tourism sectors, as well as agriculture in the southern part of the island which is ice-free year-round.

READ ALSO: Danish, Swiss researchers discover world’s ‘northernmost’ island

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