Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins

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Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins was an experimental album released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1968. The result of an all-night session of musical experimentation in Lennon's home studio at Kenwood, John and Yoko's debut album is known not only for its avant garde content, but also for its cover. The couple used a time delay camera to take nude photographs of themselves, the front cover displayed them frontally nude, while the rear cover featured them from behind.

Two Virgins was the second album released under the Apple Records label, after George Harrison's Wonderwall Music. It was distributed by Track Records in the UK and Tetragrammaton Records in the USA because EMI in the UK and Capitol Records in the US refused to handle it.

The cover provoked an outrage, prompting distributors to sell the album in a plain brown wrapper. Copies of the album were impounded as obscenity in several jurisdictions (including 30,000 copies in New Jersey). Lennon wryly commented that the uproar seemed to have less to do with the explicit nudity, and more to do with the fact that the pair were rather unattractive (and the photo unflattering; Lennon described it later as a picture of "two slightly overweight ex-junkies"). The album was named so because immediately after recording was finished, John and Yoko had sex together for the first time.

Nevertheless, the taboo-breaking album cover was perhaps the first time that a male celebrity of any consequence had exposed himself so thoroughly to the public.

Two Virgins never charted in the UK (and only 5000 British copies were ever pressed), but managed to reach #124 in the US.

The album was reissued by Ono through Rykodisc in 1997, with an additional bonus track — "Remember Love", the B-Side to "Give Peace A Chance".

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