Ascot Sound Studios
Producers: John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Mal Evans, Phil Spector
Engineers: Claude Harper, Eddie Veale
‘God Save Us’ by John Lennon and the Elastic Oz Band was recorded on 17 April 1971.
The song was written by Lennon and recorded in support of the defence fund during Oz magazine’s obscenity trial, and released as a single in July 1971
Stan and some people from Oz rang up and said, ‘Will you make us a record?’ and I thought, ‘Well, I can’t,’ because I’m all tied up contractually and I didn’t know how to do it. So then we got down to would I write a song for them? I think we wrote it the same night, didn’t we? We wrote it together and the b-side. First of all we wrote it as ‘God Save Oz’, you know, ‘God save Oz from it all,’ but then we decided they wouldn’t really know what we were talking about in America so we changed it back to ‘us’.
Sounds magazine
The session took place at Ascot Sound Studios, Lennon’s home recording facility at Tittenhurst Park near Ascot in Berkshire.
Twenty takes of ‘God Save Us’ were recorded. The eight-track tape had Klaus Voormann’s bass guitar on track 1, and Ringo Starr’s drums on 2.
Track 3 had piano by Tina Jorgensen, and acoustic guitars played by Lennon, Charles Shaar Murray, and Maureen Gray.
Track 4 had lead vocals by ‘Magic Michael’ Ramsden, while 5 had percussion: congas by Brendell, maracas by Mike Dowd and Felix Dennis, and tambourine by Stanislav Demidjuk.
The ‘Oz Crowd’ added vocals as overdubs onto tracks 6 and 7 of take 20, and track 8 was an echo track.
Lennon sang a guide vocal with each take. It was never his intention to sing on the final version, as he didn’t want the song to be the official follow-up to the successful ‘Power To The People’ single.
‘God Save Us’ was re-recorded from scratch at Ascot on 22 May 1971, with Lennon using musicians that would record the Imagine album later that week. Four takes were recorded, the last of which was chosen as the single master.
For contractual reasons Lennon needed another singer to replace his vocals. Bill Elliott was overdubbed onto the re-recording on 16 June, as were additional vocals by Yoko Ono.
We got one singer in [Ramsden], and he was all right, but he’d never had much experience recording – or singing actually, because he needed some experience singing and holding vaguely around the note. I can’t hold a note – all my songs are all sung out of tune, but I can get fairly near it sometimes. This guy was way off, but it didn’t work, so then I sang it just to show him how to sing it, how it should go, and we got this guy [Elliott] that Mal had found in a group called Half-Breed or something, and he sounded like Paul. So I thought, ‘That’s a commercial sound,’ – it would have been nice to have Paul’s voice singing ‘God Save Us’ – but the guy imitated more my demo, so he sounds like himself because he doesn’t sound like me really, but he doesn’t sound like Paul either.
‘God Save Us’ was issued as a single by Apple in July 1971, but failed to chart in either the US or UK. It was credited to Bill Elliott & The Elastic Oz Band. Elliott, who appeared on the picture sleeve, later became one half of Splinter, a group signed to George Harrison’s Dark Horse label in the 1970s.
Lennon’s guide vocal performance of ‘God Save Us’ was included on the 1998 box set John Lennon Anthology, and also on the highlights collection Wonsaponatime. On both releases it was titled ‘God Save Oz’.
Various versions of ‘God Save Us’, including the demo and outtakes, were included in the 2018 box set Imagine: The Ultimate Collection.