“I only worked with John once, on the Imagine album. He had an estate outside of London, like a manor, with a brand-new recording studio built inside. He asked me to come out and do some work, which I did. I felt bad, though, because I could only do a few tracks with him. I had to tell him that I had a prior commitment to record with Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

“The time I spent with John was great. Phil Spector was never around; he only came into the picture after John took his tracks to New York. Phil put strings and all of that stuff on.

“John was very confident about what he was doing. The Beatles had only been broken up for a little while, but I didn’t get the feeling that he was adrift or insecure to be on his own. He wasn’t very technical; he liked to work fast, only doing a few takes of things. He didn’t do a lot of recording on his own, though – it was more a band thing. Alan White played drums on some of the tracks, and he did a great job.

“I would offer opinions to John if I thought something didn’t sound right and maybe we could get it better. He was cool – there was never any kind of attitude from him. He didn’t act like a star or that he was better than anybody else. I remember him being a fun guy.

“At the same time we were doing this, John encouraged me to work with Yoko, which I did manage to do. I liked Yoko a lot as a person – she was very sharp, very educated – but I thought that what she was doing musically was pretty painful. It was like this primal scream thing. I hated it.”

Offord engineered selected tracks on Lennon's 1971 album, Imagine, and the entirety of Ono's 1971 Fly.