Remembering When John Lennon Attempted To Make an Entire Country From Scratch (For the Second Time)

Whether it was in music, morality, ethos, or national identity, John Lennon spent all four short decades of his life proving that if people were going to keep putting up rules and safeguards around him, he was just going to keep dismantling them by doing exactly what he wanted to do. On April 2, 1973, the former Beatle made it clear that he wasn’t afraid to enter the world of national diplomacy to prove his point, and neither was his wife.

Lennon and Yoko Ono held a press conference the day after April Fool’s (probably a good call) to announce the founding of their conceptual micronation, Nutopia. In the couple’s statement about their new country, they wrote, “Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NUTOPIA. NUTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people. NUTOPIA has no laws other than cosmic.”

As the two sole citizens of Nutopia, Lennon and Ono requested “diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and its people.” This immunity bit was necessary, of course, because Lennon was in an immigration battle with the United States.

Nutopia Had a New York City Embassy and a Memorable Flag

John Lennon waved a white handkerchief at the press conference he held with Yoko Ono, signifying that the small white cloth was Nutopia’s flag. “We surrender,” Lennon said, “to peace and to love.” Lennon then blew his nose with the handkerchief. The embassy for Nutopia was located at the same mailing address as the couple’s headquarters for his ongoing immigration case with the United States. Eventually, the “embassy” moved to the pair’s apartment in the Dakota building.

Lennon won his immigration case, and his deportation order was revoked in 1975, after which Nutopia was even less necessary than it ever was. Yet, the “nation” lived on in a gilded plaque that read “NUTOPIA EMBASSY” and hung over Lennon and Ono’s kitchen doorway.

John Lennon First Tried to Establish an Island Country Near Greece

Amazingly, Nutopia was not John Lennon’s first foray into establishing countries. He embarked on a similar—though, admittedly, less fleshed out—journey with former bandmates George Harrison and Paul McCartney while vacationing off the coast of Greece. The musicians set out to purchase the island of Aegoes and five unnamed islands surrounding it, with the intent of establishing a sunny utopia right there in the Mediterranean Sea. By the time they secured the funding, the idea’s allure had worn off like the LSD they were taking when they first thought to buy it.

“It’s a good job we didn’t do it,” McCartney later told Barry Miles in Many Years From Now. “Anyone who tried those ideas realized eventually there would be arguments, there would always be who has to do the washing-up, and whose turn is it to clean out the latrines. I don’t think any of us were thinking of that.”

That probably wasn’t on the agenda at the first Nutopia meeting, either.

Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

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