‘She gave me Lennon’s shirt to wear on stage’: Moby, Peaches and more on their encounters with Yoko Ono

As a major retrospective of her work opens in London, artists and writers recall their brushes with a cultural one-off

“I’m gonna stick around,” Yoko Ono warned her detractors in her 1997 song, Yes I’m a Witch. “We know you want things to stay as it is. It’s gonna change, baby.”

The criticisms she was defending herself against are well known: that she was an impostor in the male-dominated rock music world of her husband John Lennon. No matter that she was an established artist in her own right, a member of the international avant garde art movement Fluxus, while campaigning for world peace. No matter that her 1964 work Cut Piece, where she sat quietly while the audience took a pair of scissors to her best clothes and stripped her on stage, became a feminist classic. Or that her instruction pieces in the hit book Grapefruit invited readers to see the world in a new way through tasks such as “recording the sound of snow” – a sentiment she and her co-writer Lennon explored in Imagine, one of the most beloved pop songs of all time. In the 1960s and 70s, when the women’s liberation movement was in its infancy, she was an Asian woman in the public eye. In other words, a threatening anomaly and an easy target for racist and misogynistic abuse.