The night Yoko Ono asked me about gunshots following John Lennon's death

Four months after John Lennon's murder, Yoko Ono was in the studios recording Season of Glass, her parallel album to Lennon's colossal comeback, Double Fantasy. That night, in the Hit Factory on New York's West 48th Street, she was overseeing the dubbing of her self-penned tribute to Lennon, "I Don't Know Why" - a chilling, angry cry of loss and pain.

She'd planned to start the track with the sound of a gunshot - did I have an opinion on that? I was there to conduct the first interview Yoko gave since coming out of the shadows, where she'd been hiding in the 16 weeks since Lennon's murder.

Wearing huge dark glasses - even though it was 3am and the lights in the studio were way down low - she ordered the engineer to play me the song again. The track starts with an eery silence and the twitter of birdsong, followed by a mighty CRACK! before Hugh McCracken's guitar leads into Ono's clearly distressed voice, singing her bitter eulogy.

Yoko was keen to know what the public reaction would be if she included the gunshot. Given that Lennon had gone down under assassin Mark Chapman's .38 special, spitting four rounds into his neck and back, the answer should have been obvious.

"You can't..." I started, but then bit my tongue. Yes, she'd be accused of incredibly bad taste, and worse, of exploiting Lennon's death to promote her own work. Already, though I didn't yet know it, she'd planned the album cover - featuring a closeup of her husband's blood-spattered spectacles, worn the night he was gunned down.

Bad, bad taste by anybody's standards. Or was it?

It was this diminutive woman, more like a fledgling sparrow, who was bearing the immeasurable weight of his loss, even though it seems the whole world stood still in solidarity that night in December, 1980.

She was an acclaimed artist in her own right, oblivious to rigid structures and thinking - didn't she have the right to express her anger and grief in just the way she wanted, without being dictated to by middle-class convention?

I'd noted down the lyrics of I Don't Know Why as the tape spooled on. Towards the end of the song Yoko's voice rises in fury - "You bastards," she shouts. "[You] hate us... hate me! We had everything!"

It was devastating to hear that lyric the first time, in the studio, with her stony gaze waiting for my reaction. Looking back at her, I realised then she had the right to say what she wanted, how she wanted.

We'd been introduced some time before by a mutual friend, and that's why I was the first through the door to interview her after her self-ordained purdah. I knew, though the world did not, that in the days that followed Lennon's murder the three remaining Beatles had met in New York with Yoko, and round a table told her that until further notice, all incomes into Apple would be frozen. Effectively they'd shut down her bank account.

Within weeks the Fab Three met up again in London to celebrate Ringo's marriage to Barbara Bach. Not only was Yoko not invited, she wasn't even told about it. "They despise her," John had said in the months before his death.

Understandably distressed at this offhand treatment in her moment of bereavement, she descended into a private spiral of drugs which led at one stage to her having to be lifted in and out of the bath. She was surrounded by staff, but with nobody to cling to except her five-year old son Sean.

But within weeks, at the age of 47, she'd pulled herself together and was back in the studio in her attempts to lay down a lasting epitaph to her husband. In the darkened studio, half-hidden in the shadows, stood the legendary record producer Jack Douglas whose death, announced earlier this month, prompted my memory of that night. He'd produced John's Double Fantasy as well as Walking On Thin Ice, the first cut on Yoko's new album, before Phil Spector stepped in to take control.

Spector wasn't at the Hit Factory the night I turned up - indeed by then he'd hightailed it back to Los Angeles. As the other Beatles had discovered to their cost on the Let It Be album, Spector was brilliant, but a nightmare to work with. Douglas was there to lend moral support while Yoko now occupied the producer's chair.

The gunshot idea was dropped - replaced with a chilling rimshot from drummer Andy Newmark - but Yoko dug in her toes when it came to the bloodstained glasses on the cover.

"The record company called me and said the record shops would not stock the record unless I changed the cover," she said later. "They said it was in bad taste. I felt like a person soaked in blood coming into a living room full of people and reporting that my husband was dead, his body was taken away, and the pair of glasses were the only thing I had managed to salvage - and people looking at me saying it was in bad taste to show the glasses to them."

Gruesome, perhaps, but she had a point. In contrast with Yoko's earlier attempts to make is as a solo recording artist, this album was received with respect, and edged into the bottom end of the charts - giving her hope that now she could emerge from Lennon's shadow and be recognised for her own talents.

Some hope! We stayed in touch ("Daddy, there's that lady called Yoko on the phone" my young daughter, the family answering-machine, would say) and in 1986 she felt sufficiently confident to take her music on the road and launch a world tour off the back of a new album, Starpeace.

A wordplay on Ronald Reagan's Star Wars programme, it was an attempt to take forward John's and her dreams of world peace. We met in Amsterdam, where the tour was due to kick off, and I took her back to the Hilton Hotel where 17 years earlier she and John staged their 'Bed-In'. A good idea perhaps but somehow, without John, the moment was robbed of poignancy.

I watched the first-night rehearsal in an empty out-of-town theatre and wasn't surprised when the critics gave Starpeace a pasting - seeing her prowl the stage bathed in pink revolving spotlights singing John's 'Imagine' fell just short of hilarious - but on Yoko determinedly went, filling halls in eastern Europe. It perhaps didn't help that one of the songs on the album was called I Love All Of Me.

But when the tour concluded she bowed out of making music - the penny had finally dropped. "After Starpeace I was totally discouraged by the fact that there was no kind of demand for what I was doing - to put it mildly!" she admitted.

She struggled to find a new identity. We saw each other in New York a few times - when she relaunched herself as an artist (the work done mainly by others), and on another occasion having coffee in Greenwich Village around the corner from the tiny apartment where she and John lived when they first moved to the city in 1971.

One time after meeting her I went into a department store, and in the lift a strangely familiar tune came wafting out of the tinny speakers - it was "Woman", the anthem John wrote to celebrate his love for Yoko. The first single released after his murder, it'd tragically been reduced to Muzak mush.

She'd entered that ghostly vacuum that comes after fame, setting up home with Sam Havadtoy, a charming Hungarian interior designer and artist 19 years her junior, with whom she lived (and some say married) for 20 years before they parted in 2000.

Today, aged 93, Yoko no longer occupies the sprawling Dakota apartment where we once sat, infant Sean bouncing on my knee, gazing down on the car headlights wrapping themselves around Central Park. She is now wheelchair-bound and reportedly suffering ill-health - a world away from her post-Beatles euphoria days when the headline-writers replaced 'Fab Four' with 'John and Yoko'.

If once she was a significant artist in her own right, as the New York avant-gardists used to claim, she relinquished that status in favour of a place in the history-books as a famous plus-one. But Yoko Ono was a human being, continually struggling for recognition as a person but ultimately landed with the label The One Who Broke Up the Beatles.

Actually, it was John who did that.