Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band – Royal Festival Hall, London 14/06/13

Legendary cult artist, musician and peace activist, Yoko Ono and her Plastic Ono Band’s rare performance, opening London’s Meltdown Festival 2013, is nothing short of transcendental.

As if we needed any reminder of the social, artistic and musical output Ono has contributed over the past fifty years; the show opens with a ten minute video montage of key moments in Ono’s life and career: from black and white footage of her playing as a child in Japan, to her artworks including Cut Pieces, Yes, This Is Not Here, intimate home recordings with John Lennon, and clips of their work together including Two Virgins, Bed In, live shows and their Grammy-winning album Double Fantasy. The phenomenal, history-making Ono hasn’t even stepped on-stage yet, and already the atmosphere is overwhelming.

Originally Plastic Ono Band was formed to be a revolving line-up of friends and family, with past members including Eric Clapton, Yes drummer Alan White, The Who’s drummer Keith Moon and Phil Spector among others.

Tonight, the band is led and assembled by son Sean Lennon, and the six additional members resemble some of the finest artists in experimental music, including art-pop genius Cornelius, multi-instrumentalist (and Lennon’s former partner and collaborator) Yuka Honda, and Lennon’s current partner, the model and musician Charlotte Kemp Muhl, whom he introduces as “my favourite woman on the planet”.

Where on past studio and live recordings, Ono’s raw and confronting avant garde vocals – yelps and groans and “ai-ya-yas”– have seemed jarring and challenging for the ears; tonight they come across soothingly earthy, set against the band’s hallucinatory lengthy grooves.

The majority of the songs tonight are from Ono’s critically acclaimed 2009 album Between My Head and The Sky as well as forthcoming album ‘Take Me to The Land of Hell’, including the New Age-y ‘Moonbeams’, which opens tonight’s performance, as well as the stunning ‘Higa Noboru’, where Ono whimsically haikus “Why is this life so beautiful? So interesting? Why, this planet?” over Lennon’s arpeggio chords on the baby grand piano.

Several of Ono’s iconic songs are visited too. Lennon endearingly says “Mum, it’s your hit, you’ve got to play it” before they launch into 1981′s ‘Walking On Thin Ice’, which is played with full-gusto.

Each year, Meltdown festival nominates an established artist to curate the two week festival of music, art, performance and ideas, with Ono helming this year’s event with an emphasis on “pure female energy”, which sees artists like Patti Smith, Savages, Kim Gordon, Cibbo Matto and Peaches taking to the stage.

In a black figure-hugging alien one-piece and dangerously spiked heels, Peaches comes out as special guest on ‘Yes, I’m A Witch’, Ono’s 1974 version of a middle-finger song to the media and public that were so vilifying of her at the time. As Ono wiggles her petite 80-years-young frame to Peaches’ growls ‘I’m a witch, I’m a bitch’, the room becomes electrifying with so much talent on the one stage, and I half expect the universe to expand and explode that very second.

Peaches returns for the encore performance of Ono’s 1971 ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)’, which punk legend Malcolm McLaren once described as the original punk song.

While Ono’s musical and artistic output over the years has received the highest critical acclaim, a significant part of what makes her so endearing is her effervescent optimism and positive affirmations.

Ono has certainly lived a life less ordinary, but also one with incredible hardship: she survived the bombing of Tokyo and subsequent poverty – begging on the street for food, she endured divorce, miscarriage, the abduction of her daughter who was never returned, racism, sexism and, of course, the assassination of her husband on their doorstep.

And yet, Ono’s enduring message is simply one of hope and love. Tonight, the audience has been given hand held mini torches and when the lights go down for the encore Ono comes back on-stage with a torch, which she flashes into the crowd in time with the words “I Love You”. It’s from her 2004 art piece Onochord, and the audience respond flashing their lights right back and repeating Ono’s declaration.

“Please remember when you get depressed,” says Ono, “and we all get depressed, that we have each other. That we’re all in this together.”

Extraordinary and with a lot of love in the room, this was truly a momentous gig and what a way to start one of London’s most significant cultural festival.