Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions

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Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions was an experimental album released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969 and the successor to 1968's highly controversial Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins. The title parodies the BBC radio drama Life with the Lyons, which had been a favourite of Lennon's.

The album features an extended and improvised recording entitled "Cambridge 1969", recorded on 2 March at Cambridge University, before a live audience. The remainder of the album was recorded on a cassette tape in their suite at Queen Charlotte's Hospital in London during November 1968, where Yoko Ono would suffer the couple's first of three miscarriages. "Baby's Heartbeat" is in fact a crude recording of the ill-fated child's actual palpitations.

The album's front cover photo was taken while Ono was bedridden at Queen Charlotte's with Lennon by her side, while the back cover was a news photo of Lennon and Ono leaving Marylebone Police Station, after their arrest for hashish possession on 18 October 1968.

Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions failed to chart in the UK, but managed a #174 peak in the US; Lennon told the media later they'd sold about 60,000 copies in the States. (He and Ono were disappointed that Apple Records in the UK hadn't given any promotion to the album, or included it in any advertising.)

Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions was initially released on the Apple Records subsidiary label, Zapple Records, but was reissued through Rykodisc in 1997 with two previously unreleased bonus tracks.

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