On its July 2024 release, John Lennon’s Mind Games (The Ultimate Collection) Limited Edition Super Deluxe Edition set a new standard in box sets. Not only have the revelatory mixes released on the set transformed listeners’ perception of Lennon’s previously underappreciated 1974 album, but the set is a piece of art in its own right… and its secrets are still unravelling.
The John Lennon Estate had already set an impressive precedent with musically revealing and immaculately designed and researched deluxe sets for Imagine (2018), Gimme Some Truth (2020) and John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (2021). The Super Deluxe Edition of Mind Games ups the ante by adding replica editions of artwork, seemingly never-ending puzzles, exquisite and innovative design work and immensely covetable objects.
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It’s an outpouring of love and mischief that reflects both the music and art made by John and Yoko and speaks of the immense creativity of the team that put it together. Fittingly, art directors Sean Ono Lennon and Simon Hilton have been nominated for a GRAMMY® for Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package. They spoke to uDiscover about working on the groundbreaking set.
What made you decide to give Mind Games such an opulent treatment?
Simon Hilton: Sean and I both felt very strongly that Mind Games was a real diamond in the rough, almost as good as Imagine as an album, but it had been mixed very badly. We listened to the multi-tracks, and they sounded amazing, but something weird happened at the final mixing stage that pushed the mix up into a very high treble range. There’s a story that, at one point, there was a line from the studio into a car in the basement of the Hit Factory, and they’d listen to mixes on the car to see whether they would sound good on car stereo speakers, so that may have been the reason. And then, during the mixing, John was getting quite antsy to get out of New York, and I think he rushed it. So we both felt that this deserved to be remixed and be given a classic treatment. But I don’t think we anticipated when we started doing a mega box for this quite how mega it would become [laughs].
Sean Ono Lennon: My initial inspiration was, what if we gamify Mind Games? What if we make it into an interactive, multi-layered, multimedia mind exploration with meditation and puzzles and all sorts of clues and easter eggs? And expand it so you can go on treasure hunts and find things in real life. From the beginning, we had consultation meetings with Chris Ramsey, who’s the world’s leading puzzle box expert and a very famous magician, and he gave us a lot of really cool ideas. I wanted to make something that would occupy really deep record collectors, maybe for years, because there are all these hidden aspects. And in fact, there’s still more to come that will intertwine with the puzzle and game elements that are in the box. I still don’t want to give everything away.
Can you give an idea of the time scale, teamwork and attention to detail involved?
SH: We started three years ago. Sean and I led the charge, and we had a great team working on it, from Faye Fanneran, who runs bespoke packaging at UMG, and Michal Peřinka over at GZ Media, the manufacturing company, to Paul McGhie, who was our A&R at UMR and did an amazing job of corralling everybody. We debated everything – cardboard thicknesses, every form of substrate, and how best to wrap the boxes so that they fit perfectly. We used the best quality card and the best vinyl. There’s been a tendency for box sets to have replica concert tickets, flyers or posters but to print them one-sided, on really thin paper, which makes them feel really inauthentic and cheap. We wanted everything to feel totally authentic and use the best quality textiles.
SOL: The You Are Here canvas is made from real canvas and real wood. Danger Box is a Perspex replica of the original piece that I grew up with at the Dakota. Every single element of the box set is as high quality as we could possibly make it. I’m very glad that Universal allowed us to do that because it’s not something that people have really done before, to be honest.
SH: We went through multiple iterations of all of the contents to get it right. With the Nutopian Embassy door plaque and Danger Box plaque, the first attempts just didn’t look right, so we found the Hermes kits that were commonly used for engraving metals during the ‘60s and ‘70s in London and New York to get the exact fonts for the maximum authenticity and used exactly the same metals, custom cut.
SOL: That’s why it’s called The Ultimate Collection Super Deluxe Edition, because it really is the ultimate in quality, the ultimate in design, the ultimate in the sound design, the Dolby Atmos mixes, you get the outtakes, the extras. We left no stone unturned.
MIND GAMES – THE ULTIMATE COLLECTION, SUPER DELUXE EDITION – INSIDE THE BOX
ENCLOSURE: DANGER BOX
The set is housed in a 13” cube, which is a Perspex reproduction of Yoko Ono’s 1968 artwork Danger Box. The original artwork was a playful piece with an engraved inscription, which warned visitors that interaction with the work might come at a price, “The management will not guarantee that a hand when put in this hole will come out in the same condition as prior to entry.”
SH: Yoko has a lot of artworks that are cubes that involve Perspex, so when we realized we needed an enclosure, Danger Box seemed to be very pertinent to that. The box was adapted because, obviously, the original artwork was empty. Michael and his team at GZ very cleverly added hidden catches at the bottom so that you could carry it and it would bear the weight, but also so that when you put your hand in and pull on the lip, it unclicks at the bottom. The flaps fall down, and that reveals your experience. So it’s loosely taking the interpretation of what the Danger Box is – whether the contents are potentially dangerous or not. Rather than just putting it in a box, we wanted it to have a metaphorical meaning.
BOX 1: BUILD AROUND IT/HOLOGRAM EP
When the enclosure is removed, the sides of the box softly fall to reveal nine stacked boxes, resplendent in teal, white and black – colours that represent the Mind Games livery. Sitting on top of the stack is a replica of John Lennon’s 1968 artwork Build Around It, which contains the Mind Games EP on 180g 12” vinyl (featuring four tracks hidden on the standard deluxe edition). The vinyl is a hologram-engraved picture disc of a vivid Karmic Wheel design, loaded with mystic imagery and puzzle clues.
SH: A multiple edition of Danger Box was created for an exhibition called 3→∞, aka 3 To Infinity – New Multiple Art, in Whitechapel, London in 1970, which incorporated a replica of Build Around It, a very interesting piece of John’s from 1968. It was a two-inch square, black plastic penny holder, which had ‘BUILD AROUND IT / JOHN LENNON 1968’ engraved on it in white, presented inside a see-through plastic enclosure with ‘DANGER BOX / OPEN AT OWN RISK / YOKO ONO 1968’ engraved on it.
It was John’s rejection of the ideas of the Destruction In Art symposium [London, 1966], which was co-organized by the German artist and activist Gustav Metzger and explored the idea of attacking and destroying artworks in response to talk of revolution in the streets. But John was saying, ‘No, build around it; you can’t smash it down because what do you do next? You’ve got to create some kind of allegiance and growth.’
It was kind of like a Plastic Ono Band idea, that the audience is part of the band, part of the performance. It’s our responsibility, collectively, to build things. In many ways, this box set was built around it. It was a huge collaborative effort that created something really quite beautiful.
The design of the Karmic Wheel gave us a chance to mix together the mysticism and hide some messages in it. As well as there being constellations, the I-Ching and astrological symbols – the Libra and the Aquarius are slightly highlighted you may notice, which are John and Yoko’s signs – there are hidden messages in Morse code as well. The hologram disc was something that Faye at Universal had wanted to do for a while, and she found very willing collaborators in Sean and myself. It’s at the top of the box because it has obvious immediate and unique value, and it sets the tone for some of the mystical contents. It’s almost like a talisman that sits on the top, and rather beautifully refracts the rainbow colours we see in the album artwork.
BOX 2: LPs BOX
The seven vinyl LPs of mixes in the set presented an opportunity to produce variations on the original Mind Games front cover and some creative inner sleeves and record labels, along with an eight-page booklet, two postcards and two posters – one featuring an explanation of the I-Ching designed by Perfect Day and a replica of a 1973 in-store advertising poster.
SH: We needed four gatefold sleeves to house the LPs. So we had a bit of fun with John’s photocollage from the original front cover, having the sun and the moon rising in different places on each sleeve and making John different sizes. We tracked down the background plate, which was by a photographer called David Plowden, and the photo of Yoko he used was by Bob Gruen.
SOL: The original Mind Games cover was this very beautiful piece that my dad made with my mother as a giant mountain in the distance that dwarfs him. He’s this little figure receding into this landscape, this Yokoscape. It shows how lost he felt and how monumental my mom was in his life.
It reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cut-out images. I thought we could play around with it, removing and putting back pieces for alternate versions, like a work in progress or to give a sense of movement to the collage, almost to make it come alive.
SH: And for the inner sleeves, we used magical elements or optical illusions. The Ultimate Mixes inner sleeve is a replica of the original album’s inner. Then the Elemental Mixes has a blueprint of John’s production notes, and on the other side, a blueprint of Harumi Shibukawa’s “Tenmon Bun’ya no zu” map of the heavens. John’s hands are on the Elements Mixes inner sleeve – when they were in LA he made prints to go to a palm reader which were preserved in the archive. You can put your hand on them and hopefully connect over time and space with John. The Evolution Documentary sleeve has stereograms and Magic Eye pictures of Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess, and Tsukuyomi, the Japanese moon god and a long backstory about the box set hidden in text you can only read with the ultraviolet torch, that’s laid out in a spiral in homage to the Imagine inner sleeve. We wanted to tie in the front cover so that you have the sun and the moon in the sky, and the rainbow is the hologram disc. The Evolution Documentary inner sleeve has parallel line illusion patterns of John and Yoko’s faces in red and blue. The Raw Studio Mixes have images of the master tape boxes and the tracking sheet. And then on the Out-takes inner sleeve, it’s John’s face constructed from the complete lyrics of every song on the album.
And the record labels are based on optical illusions, color blindness tests, or when they’re spinning they create color. They’re all designed to be fairly hypnotic when they’re played on the record deck.
BOX 3: MAGIC BOX
An explosion of creativity is packed into this box: two wallets, each containing 46” square map artworks designed by cartographic fine artist Ed Fairburn, John Lennon’s Liverpool and Yoko Ono’s Tokyo; The Ultimate Mixes and Out-takes on a 2LP color picture vinyl set designed by zoetrope animation artist Drew Tetz housed in a bar animation sleeve; a real zoetrope for use on your record player; two more postcards; and – if you look hard enough – a 9×9” transparent puzzle board.
SOL: Another beautiful piece of art inside the package is by Ed Fairburn, an artist who takes these incredibly intricate maps of different cities and integrates them with very beautiful, detailed crosshatched drawings or portraits.
SH: Ed’s a genius. He sourced the maps from around the time of both John and Yoko’s births (1940 and 1933) because a lot of Liverpool was bombed, and Tokyo was firebombed in World War II. A lot of structural changes have happened since then, and a lot of the streets in the maps aren’t there anymore.
He took about two years to source the maps and do all of the fine art cross-hatching. We were thinking, ‘These are really beautiful, but how can we go to the next level? How can we gamify this?’ This is where we came up with the idea of putting different locations on the map. So we went through all of the possible source material we could find and put together a list of as many significant addresses as we could for both John and Yoko; there are 700 locations altogether. The locations took about a year to do and were ever-changing.
Once they were finalized, we meticulously added our locations on the map after figuring them out on Google Maps. Next, we had to make all the points on the map the same font size as the original street names and put them all in Gill Sans [font]. And then, at Ed’s suggestion, because Photoshop renders them so precisely, we defocused them ever so slightly and used raised black rather than a deep black, so they blended really well. When you look at it closely, it looks super authentic, as if it was originally printed that way. Then we had to do color balancing on the different overlays because the original was so huge it had been put together in different panels.
SOL: We wanted to expand the gamified aspect of Mind Games out into the world. If you shine the UV light on it, you’ll discover that certain parts of the map of Liverpool are highlighted. And if you go to those places in the booklet, you’ll find a description of the place.
We did a treasure hunt in Liverpool where people had to see how many particular points on the map they could find and visit in one day. When they went there, they found a QR code to scan with their phone, which linked to their Citizen of Nutopia ID and gave them points on the website and prizes in real life to collect at the end of the day. It was another way of expanding the content of the box set to be more than just your average record release.
SOL: When I started my record label, Chimera Music, I was looking into making a record player that was a zoetrope. I found this guy, Drew Tetz, who was already doing that. So when it came time to make Mind Games, I thought, Wow, that’s perfect. It’s an optical illusion, which is a mind game. It comes with a zoetrope, and if you put it on a record player, turn it on, and look through the slits from the side, you’ll see my dad dancing around. It’s an analog animation. Then there are also some beautiful little animations of my dad dancing around, my dad and mom. And those activate if you look at them through the video camera on your cell phone, because the frame rate matches exactly the frequency and speed of the images that Drew printed on the vinyl. That’s one of the coolest parts of the package; it really turned out to be beautiful.
SH: The mirror-board, die-cut gatefold sleeve and two zoetrope discs – they were all Drew’s ideas. They’re housed in this barrier grid pattern, so when you pull the record out the sleeve, it changes from John’s face to Yoko’s. We gave him the footage of John dancing and the stills of John and Yoko to work with, and he just crafted it into this beautiful artwork.
At some point, we should put out Drew’s outtakes because he did so many different designs. He created fantastic animations of John’s drawings and all kinds of alternate versions. We could only put in two discs’ worth of stuff for Drew. Honestly, we could have done a whole box with just his crazy and beautiful ideas.
BOX 4: PUZZLE TILES
Those who managed to find the puzzle board in box three will be intrigued by the contents of the next box – a grey linen drawstring bag containing 97 transparent tiles, each with a single letter in white. This can be used to attempt to solve the word puzzle game, which is printed on the Citizen Of Nutopia ID Card included in all of the 2024 versions of Mind Games. Clues are hidden in just about every element of the box set. Those who solve the puzzle can enter the solution on the Citizen Of Nutopia website to earn points, and who knows, that may yet lead to more puzzles…
SOL: If you look at my mom and dad’s library, half the books are about numerology or the Egyptian Book Of The Dead and all this interesting stuff. So when it came time to do the Mind Games box set, I thought, well, what is a mind game? It’s a game of the mind. That opened up many different things, whether it was meditation or just the idea of playing a game with your mind, like solving a puzzle. Or life being a puzzle.
BOX 5: STANDARD DELUXE BOX SET
The deluxe Mind Games set comes in a sturdy 10×10” box containing 6CDs of all of the mixes included in the LPs box, plus two Blu-Rays (again with all the mixes but in 24-192 stereo and 5.1 surround, Dolby Digital and Dolby Atmos mixes) and a 136-page hardback book, poster, postcards and the Citizen Of Nutopia ID card.
SH: When we first started this series of box sets, Yoko and I spent a great deal of time setting the parameters for what they should look like. For example, the deluxe box sets should all have the same formatting style and be 10” squared so everything lines up on the bookcase. We talked a lot about authenticity, the fonts from the original album covers carrying through. The layouts are exactly as she wanted them in terms of header sizes, margins, spacing, and the way photographs are arranged. They’re all printed on matte paper instead of glossy finishes. And we’re very big on crediting and making sure the lyrics are accurate. We wanted the listener to be truly immersed – in that time-honored tradition of listening to an LP and reading all the liner notes. These aren’t objects that you’re meant to open and then put on a shelf and forget about. They’re supposed to be something you can enjoy and live with, and enjoy for a long period of time.
We had the idea of different sets of mixes after looking at lots of box sets to get a feel of what we felt did and didn’t work as part of the experience. We refined it further after Imagine because we felt that people don’t really like to listen to two takes of the same song, one after the other.
We’ve grouped songs together as albums in specific sets of mixes – Ultimate, Elements, Elemental, Evolution, Raw Studio and Out-takes. It’s a process of presenting them in a different way, or we might find a guitar solo that wasn’t used and feature it or highlight amazing tiny elements. Then, when you go back to the Ultimate Mixes, you’ll appreciate the song a whole new way.
We tend to work on the Ultimate mixes first with Sean producing, Paul Hicks mixing and Sam Gannon engineering. We often refer back to other John songs for reference in terms of tone or emotion. Amongst their talents, Sean’s got the most incredible ear for timbre and tone and really drills into the individual sounds of each instrument or voice. Paul is incredible at reproducing all the original effects and effects chains, and mixing them so beautifully, and Sam is very skilled at manipulating and sonically improving the audio waveforms and stems to get the absolute best in quality from them. So having agreed on all the sounds, effects and improvements, we break the mixes down into different groups. Each musician gets a different day in the sun on the Elements Mixes. This time, we found almost a stripped-back version of the album that was mainly without drums but was more acoustic, so we created this new category called the Elemental Mixes. Sam’s Evolution Mixes always tell the story of how the song came together using demos and studio chat outtakes. Then, the Raw Studio Mixes are where Rob Stevens does these ‘in the studio’ mixes, which are great.
SOL: Listening to my dad’s music was the way that I filled that hole of him not being in my life. And because I spent so much of my childhood trying to understand my dad through his music, I think I understand what kind of mix is best for his songs. That may sound presumptuous, but if you listen to “Aisumasen (I’m Sorry)” and “Out The Blue,” those songs, to me, sound like Plastic Ono Band in terms of the style of them. I mean, you can hear him really, in a way, trying to woo my mother back; there’s a lot of love in his voice. I really felt like we were able to improve those two songs, specifically with the Ultimate Mixes. And so that’s why I really tried with Paul [Hicks] to make a drier drum sound and bring the piano up and make the mix more in that vein of his earlier solo work. And once I’d heard those two tracks in that way, I think they objectively sound better than they’ve ever sounded.
BOX 6: I-CHING BOX
Inside this box are three items that could lead to enlightenment or even help you solve the puzzles of the Mind Games set. You’ll find a set of three bespoke John & Yoko brass I-Ching coins; a ‘magic magnet’ that can be used to open the hidden compartment in the Magic Box; and an ultraviolet torch to uncover otherwise invisible puzzle clues and messages throughout the set.
SH: We found this I-Ching diary that John had started in 1973. It was fascinating, especially because this was evidence that he’d really embraced magical thinking again. So that’s why you’ll see the I-Ching as a motif being used so much, along with other things like astrology, Chaldean numerology, constellations or star signs. They were leaning once more into magical thinking. Philosophically, in this period, John and Yoko were changing. They also embraced feminism and felt that there was more useful thought about what would happen when the revolution came from the women’s movement rather than the aggressive male Yippies.
SOL: Alex Aiken designed the I-Ching coins, which are very high quality, and similar to the ones my dad designed to use at the Dakota where I grew up. And my mom did I-Ching, too, actually. My dad famously sings about I-Ching. In the song “God” he says, I don’t believe in it, but I think he did actually believe in all those things. The hexagrams of the I-Ching relate to puzzle elements in the box set, which connect to things that have meaning for my dad. They’re little easter eggs for hardcore fans who want to dig and find some more symbolism in the packaging.
BOX 7: JOHN & YOKO: MIND GAMES – THAMES & HUDSON BOOK
The third in a series of companion books (following Plastic Ono Band and Imagine), the Mind Games 288-page hardback, edited by Simon Hilton, is an in-depth exploration of a period of John and Yoko’s career that has, until now, been curiously overlooked.
SH: The book in the deluxe set is more John and Yoko’s memories, the musicians’ recollections about the songs, and a guided tour through the music on the box set with lyrics and credit. The Thames & Hudson book digs much deeper into their magical thinking and the library of books they were reading at the time. It goes a lot more into feminism and the feminist movement. There are reproductions of lots of letters. There’s a lot more memorabilia from the archive.
It’s a real treasure hunt, putting the books together. If anybody’s still alive, I’ll track them down. The interviews with the musicians were quite possibly one of my favorite parts of the whole process. They hadn’t really been recognized as a band before because Mind Games has been so massively overlooked. And so much happened in that period in John and Yoko’s lives that hasn’t really been covered by many other authors; it was a real adventure uncovering that.
I said to Jim Keltner, “I don’t know whether this is going to work or not, but would you indulge me? What I’d really like to do is just to spend an hour with you, play some studio takes from the sessions, and see if it triggers any memories.” Eight hours later, he was begging me to play him more stuff, and I’d got 10 times as much material as I needed. Throughout his career, he’s been sat in booths with headphones on, listening so intensely. So, as soon as he heard the sessions, he was back there 100%, and all of these really clear memories came through. Then by a process of going from one person to another, I found the whole band. And exactly the same happened with all of them. I think with David Spinozza [guitarist], we went on for three days or something!
These guys aren’t getting any younger, so it is possibly the last time that we’ll get everyone to talk about their experiences. When we started this series, Yoko was adamant that we would only include commentary from people who were there, in the room. People have different memories of some events, so I try to keep them in as well because that’s what makes things interesting. Certainly, when we come to Walls And Bridges, if you take some of the more drunken events, everybody’s got a completely different take on what happened. I think there are about 10,000 people who say they were all at The Troubadour when John was thrown out.
BOX 8: CITIZEN OF NUTOPIA
More highly covetable and painstakingly reproduced items, themed around Nutopia, the imaginary country created by John and Yoko that they introduced to the world at a press conference held on April 2, 1973 in New York. Included are a Nutopian Flag, a replica of the Nutopian Embassy plaque from the Dakota, a small white cloth with John and Yoko doodle, a replica of Lennon’s custom-made Seal Of Nutopia stamp and three badges.
SOL: It’s a really beautiful thing. That’s what the Nutopian flag and the idea of Nutopia represent – a world without borders. It’s the vision of the song “Imagine,” but you know, it manifested as a conceptual country that they created. That’s why we created the Citizen of Nutopia website: to create a modern digital version of this vision where you could go and meditate with people around the world and see other people who think like you and are into the John & Yoko trip.
SH: The Great Seal Of Nutopia rubber stamp is a genuine thing that John had made. And if you look through the Thames & Hudson book, you’ll see that he stamped it on loads of letters that he wrote. So we tried to gather as many of those letters as we could in the book – the seal also means that we could collate correspondence of his that was otherwise difficult to date. Then, we made the yin-yang fish badge using John’s design for the seal. The Nutopian Flag was something that we felt would be really nice for people to be able to put up. It’s a flag of surrender and peace. And there’s also a little white hanky in there, which is a replica of the one they waved at the Nutopia press conference. Then we included the Not Insane badge, which John really loved, so he wore it quite a lot. And the You Are Here badge goes with the You Are Here artwork from his 1968 exhibition, which, although it’s a little bit out of the time period, obviously goes with the song “You Are Here.”
We were trying to build in lots of objects of fascination and things that would hopefully inspire people’s imagination and also help connect them to John and Yoko’s forward-thinking, philosophical and anthropological leanings. And I hope that people are putting the artworks up on their walls and taking the box to bits, rather than putting it on a shelf.
BOX 9: YOU ARE HERE
The final box in the set houses a white linen bag containing a 12” circular canvas reproduction of John Lennon’s 1968 artwork, You Are Here. The original artwork was the focal point of Lennon’s first major art show, at the Robert Fraser Gallery, London, in July 1968 – a piece which demonstrated his natural affinity with conceptual art.
SOL: I think it’s remarkable in that you’re also getting editions of artwork by my parents in the box. Like there’s my dad’s drawing of You Are Here – it’s a beautiful, perfect recreation of that canvas he drew on. Even down to the back of the canvas – you have that little writing on it that you can check out. And they’re certified by the Estate because they are real editions of those pieces. That goes for the Danger Box as well.
LOVE IS THE ANSWER
SOL: The whole thing is something I’m really proud of. I think it turned out beautifully, and I’m just happy I had the chance to do it.
Everyone who’s seen the box set can see that a lot of love went into it. I hope that everyone realizes that the reason it’s so elaborate is because it’s an expression of how much I care about my parents’ work and my dad’s record, especially.
I think the only meaningful way that I can show my love to him is to meticulously work on his music and on reintroducing it to the world, keeping it in the public consciousness and making sure that he doesn’t get brushed aside by the tsunami of new content and information on the internet.
I want to make sure that John and Yoko’s work and their message don’t get lost. I think the whole thing is, in a way, my attempt to express and show my love for them and my appreciation of their work and how much it’s influenced me. What better way for me to express my love and admiration for my dad than to try to do something really special with his music today?
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