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From
an article by Robert Palmer, NY Times (October 13th 1985)
''Starpeace''
is the most balanced album Miss Ono has made. The songs are drawn from life's
ups and downs, its despairs and its joys. Miss Ono has been writing catchy pop
melodies for more than a decade, but her reedy vocal quality kept many listeners
from hearing them. Mr. Laswell has discreetly added back-up singers on key lines
and choruses, emphasizing the melodiousness of the material without overpowering
Miss Ono's vocal leads. He has also assembled a band, drawn from his developing
repertory company of musical individualists, that includes a Jamaican rhythm section,
a South Indian violinist, percussionists from Cuba and West Africa, and even the
brilliant jazz drummer Tony Williams. ''Starpeace'' is state-of-the-art pop music
for 1985, and a vision of the international, trans-idiomatic popular music to
come." Read the full article
Starpeace Tour
Stephen
Holden, New York Times (May 25th 1986): "'We're on the threshold of the dawning
of the age of wisdom - we're going to make it!'' announced Yoko Ono at her Beacon
Theater concert on Thursday evening. The event, which kicked off the East Coast
leg of her international ''Starpeace'' tour, was an unabashedly sentimental affair
in which Miss Ono alternately sang -backed by a strong six-member rock band -
and reminisced and philosophized in childlike utopian slogans. The
songs during the first half of the show were sequenced as a personal chronology
that followed the singer's emotional recovery after the slaying of her husband,
John Lennon. The eerie, electronic dance tune ''Walking on Thin Ice'' summed up
1981 - ''the worst year of my life,'' according to Miss Ono. The plaintive ballad
''Goodbye, Sadness'' summed up 1982. In 1984, Miss Ono said, ''I realized George
Orwell miscalculated. He said Big Brother was going to take over and we would
all become humanoids. But we are still humans who can say 'I love you' to each
other.'' Early in the concert, Miss Ono's small, girlish
voice had difficulty competing with the band. But as the evening progressed, she
gained in confidence. Among many original songs she performed, the most appealing
was ''Sky People,'' a romantically flavored pop-rock mantra in the same mood as
John Lennon's ''Imagine'' and ''Across the Universe.'' But Miss Ono's own version
of ''Imagine'' was radically different in spirit from her late husband's. Where
Mr. Lennon's record evoked a dream that his wistful vocal implied could never
come true, Miss Ono made it into an optimistic broadside, punctuated with wildly
enthusiastic ''yay-heys!''
Yoko's memories of the tour
From
a Boston Globe article regarding the 1990s Rising tour (May 8th 1996): "I
was a bit scared to come out, because I remember how it was with the `Starpeace'
tour 10 years ago," said Ono. "I remember a full-house show in Berlin
and the next morning in the paper was a photo of me standing on stage and there
was nobody in the audience. It said, `Yoko looking for the audience.' And I'm
thinking, `Why did they take that photo?' As it turns out, it was a sound-check
photo. That's really something, isn't it? So I thought, `Are they going to do
that to me again?"
Tour dates
A live appearance on the WDR German television programme Mensch
Meier, a prelude to the actual tour.
Brussels, Belgium
Congresgebouw,
The Hague, the Netherlands
West Berlin, Germany
Warsaw, Poland
Munich, West Germany
Frankfurt, West Germany
Stuttgart, West Germany?
Stockholm, Sweden
Copenhagen, Denmark
Musikhalle, Hamburg, West
Germany
Budapest,
Hungary
Grosser
Konzerthaussaal, Vienna, Austria
Ljubljana, Yugoslavia
Wembley Conference Centre, London, Britain
Warfield
Theater, San Francisco
Beverly
Theater, Los Angeles?
The
Forum, Montreal, Canada
Beacon
Theatre, New York
 Yoko
Ono's personal tour diary for fanzine Instant Karma
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©
Anita Gosch
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starpeace