Something John failed to mention was the fact that they were turned back at Southampton dock not because of his notoriety but because they were trying to travel to France without passports. The plane they "finally made" into Paris was not a scheduled airliner but an executive jet which John impatiently asked for when he realized that it was impossible to get married on a cross Channel ferry.

John's decision to get married appeared to have been made suddenly on March 14, 1969, when he and Yoko were being driven down to Poole in Dorset to visit his Aunt Mimi. This was two days after Paul's registry office wedding to Linda. John asked his chauffeur, Les Anthony, to go on into Southampton to enquire about the possibility of John and Yoko's being married at sea. When this was found to be impossible, John decided to go to Paris and instructed his office to come up with a way of arranging a quiet wedding there. Peter Brown discovered that this couldn't be organized at short notice but that they could marry in Gibraltar because it was a British protectorate and John was a British citizen.

In the end, the couple flew by private plane to Gibraltar on March 20, and went straight to the British Consulate, where the registrar, Cecil Wheeler, conducted a ten minute marriage ceremony. They were on the ground for less than an hour before taking off for Amsterdam where they had booked the Presidential Suite at the Hilton. Their stay in Amsterdam was to be an extraordinary "honeymoon". Instead of requiring the usual privacy, they invited the world's press to invade their bedroom daily between 10am and 10pm during which time, they said, they would be staying in bed for peace.

Not unnaturally, the world's press hoped that John and Yoko might be intending to consummate their marriage in public. After all, they'd exposed their naked bodies on the cover of their album Two Virgins and had recorded the heartbeat of the child that Yoko later miscarried. There seemed to be no area of their lives which they weren't willing to turn into performance art.

To the journalists' frustration, the sight that greeted them in suite 902 was of John and Yoko in neatly pressed pyjamas sitting bolt upright in bed doing nothing more than talking about "peace". It was the perfect deal. The media had an insatiable appetite for articles about the Beatles and John would do almost anything to put over his message about peace. The Amsterdam "Bed In" meant that all parties went away satisfied.

For seven days, they lay there holding court while a stream of media people sat and asked serious questions. The coverage was incredible. They did live interviews with American radio stations, made a 60 minute documentary for themselves and saw their faces appear on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.

"Yoko and I are quite willing to be the world's clowns, if by doing it we do some good," said John. "For reasons known only to themselves, people do print what I say. And I'm saying peace. We're not pointing a finger at anybody. There are no good guys and bad guys. The struggle is in the mind. We must bury our own monsters and stop condemning people. We are all Christ and all Hitler. We want Christ to win. We're trying to make Christ's message contemporary. What would he have done if he had advertisements, records, films, TV and newspapers? Christ made miracles to tell his message. Well, the miracle today is communications, so let's use it."

From Amsterdam, they went to Vienna where they stopped overnight at the Hotel Sacher and ate some of its famous Sacher Torte (a rich chocolate cake) before watching the television premiere of their film Rape.

On April 1, they arrived back in London and gave a press conference at the airport. John expected a hostile reception because Yoko (a foreign divorcee, no less) was not considered the ideal partner for a British Beatle. To his surprise, the welcome was a warm one.

The Ballad of John and Yoko was recorded by Paul and John with Paul playing bass, piano, maracas and drums, while John played lead and acoustic guitars and sang the vocals.