Sean Lennon on conceptualising the Grammy-winning reissue of John Lennon’s ‘Mind Games’

As the 50th anniversary for his dad’s music rolled around, Sean Lennon’s ambitions for a new piece of art were clear.

‘I wanted to make something that would occupy record collectors for years,’ wrote the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono on johnlennon.com.

‘I wanted it to be something that would withstand the test of time as an object of interest for people… What better way for me to express my love and admiration for my dad than to try to do something really special with his music today? … I want to make sure that John and Yoko’s work and their message [don’t] get lost. And so I think the whole thing is, in a way, my attempt to express and show my love for them and my appreciation of their work and how much it’s influenced me.'

Earlier in February 2025, at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, America’s Recording Academy duly recognised that 'whole thing' with its top honour: the Grammy Award for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Packaging for John Lennon’s Mind Games (The Ultimate Collection) Super Deluxe Box Set.

That packaging for the reissue of Lennon’s 1973 album is as elaborate as that wording. And then some. Masterminded by Sean, 49, and Simon Hilton, British filmmaker, multimedia creative and consultant to the Lennon Estate, it took the pair the best part of three years to conceptualise, design and create. The results are indeed Super Deluxe, as indicated by the price-point of the limited (1,100) run: £1,350. But in its simplest, visible form, this repackage of Lennon’s classic third solo album is a 13-inches-squared Perspex cube.

Inside The Box: JOHN LENNON MIND GAMES • GRAMMY® Award Winner • Ltd Edition Super Deluxe Box Set. - YouTube

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Appearances, though, are deceptive – purposefully. Or, in fact, playing mind games. By Hilton’s estimation, over 100 individual items are concealed within, from artworks to zoetropes via invisible images viewable via UV flashlight (also included), with the structure only beginning to reveal its treasures once a hand, placed inside a hole in the top of the box, applies the right amount of pressure.

As Sean told me last week, 'I was obsessed with this idea of gamifying Mind Games', that tricksy aspiration realised in a package brimming with puzzles, in-jokes and Easter Eggs that will indeed occupy record collectors for years. So much so that he and Hilton initially tried to sell it for £999.99, reflecting the lucky number nine beloved of his parents, until the project’s sheer deluxe-ness overcame them and record label Universal Music Recordings' budget.

It was a rare instance of their vaulting ambition – and deep-seated commitment to honouring the entirety of Lennon and Ono’s life and work and art – being thwarted. Foundational to the packaging design is Danger Box, a conceptual artwork that Ono first exhibited at London’s Indica Gallery in 1966. That cube had an opening in the side and came with a warning to any gallery-goer who dared stick a hand inside: 'The management will not guarantee the hand, when put in this hole, will come out in the same condition as prior to entry.'

Even for young Sean, living with Danger Box as an ornament in the family’s home in New York’s Dakota building, it held fear. 'He was a bit afraid to put his hand in it,' says Hilton. Nonetheless, 'that felt to us a nice metaphor for the whole box-set experience. We created this latched bottom to the box, and the pressure that's exerted by your hand flicks out these latches that undo the five sides of the box, so you can then lift it up. The idea being that you're going to go through an experience when opening this box that will leave you in a different state.'

On top of that, adds Hilton: 'It’s got John’s head on the front. So it’s like you’re reaching into his mind.' Nowhere is that more apparent than in the inclusion within the set of the ‘Citizen of Nutopia’ box, a lovingly recreated collection of memorabilia that encompasses a large white Nutopian Flag, a Nutopian Embassy Plaque, Citizen of Nutopia ID Card, Great Seal of Nutopia stamp and a collection of badges. Nutopia was the conceptual country created by Lennon and Ono on 1 April 1973. It was the couple’s typically jokey-but-pointed response to the Nixon administration’s attempt to kick Lennon out of America – because, as Hilton puts it, 'he was a threat to the minds of the youth of the nation who were being shipped off to Vietnam. John was protesting the war, obviously. So, anybody could be a citizen, just by declaring their love of Nutopia. It's a very playful thing about borders and countries… to demonstrate the ridiculousness of it all. They were trying to spread peace and love, and the authorities were trying to kick them out of the country.' Now, in 2025, Nutopia lives on, and we can all become citizens (if we’ve a spare £1,350, of course).

That brass embassy plaque is an exact replica of the one stuck to the back of the kitchen door at the Ono-Lennon family apartment at The Dakota building in New York. 'I tracked down the Hermes engraving set – not Hermès the handbag manufacturer,' clarifies Hilton, 'that was used by locksmiths’ shops in New York at that time to engrave plaques. Then we found a kit through eBay, and then we made a prototype using that, and found the same brass. So it’s got the exact materials, dimensions, font, cut of the font, depth of that cut, where the holes are for the screws, what the screws are made of – everything. It was that level of detail.'

For Sean, that impetus for a deep dive into his parents’ consciousness began during Covid. Around then, he and his mother – now, at 92, finally retired from art, activism and music – relocated from Manhattan to upstate New York. 'I had a lot more time to be isolated and alone and think about the project,' says Sean, an artist with his own musical career (he has two albums in the works, he tells me, a band project and a solo project).

'My imagination was especially fertile because I had removed myself from the urban metropolis, noises and people and activities! And it made me have big dreams about what we were going to do!' Sean says with a laugh. Further inspiration came from the world of another former Beatle. In 2021, George Harrison’s widow Olivia and son Dhani released a box set of The Quiet One’s landmark post-Fab Four 1970 solo album All Things Must Pass. It was an ‘Uber Deluxe’ package, retailing for £859.99, that included, among other artefacts and in a reflection of the album’s iconic sleeve art, garden gnomes.

'Simon and I had just worked on the Gimme Some Truth “best of John Lennon” box set and we had a lot of limitations on what we [could] do with that. Then Olivia and Dhani came out with [their box set], and I really thought what they did was so beautiful. I said: “We should be allowed to do something more sophisticated.”’

Or, as Hilton puts it, in another feat of the members of the Beatles pushing each other to ever-more-rarefied levels of creativity, the Harrisons’ box was 'a higher tier of Super Deluxe. What we had considered to be the Super Deluxe then became the Standard Deluxe!' Cue, for Sean, the push to make the Mind Games packaging a 'magical box of treats', one that goes way beyond the usual collection of 180g vinyls, 350gsm cardboard LP sleeves, CDs, explanatory texts and photography (although, of course, those are all in there, too). And again, the inclusion of the packaging’s phantasmagoria of items was rooted in his parents’ partnership.

'The foundation for that idea of putting in the I-Ching coins and the Nutopian flag,' he begins, the former a reference to his parents’ passion for spirituality and magical thinking, 'all these physical items, it comes from Wedding Album.' That 1969 record was the third and final release in a series of experimental collaborative albums made by his parents. 'Growing up, I would open Wedding Album and there were little strips of photographs and postcards and objects. It seemed so cool to get these trinkets that made you feel very close to the people who made the record. It was very innovative, and like you were being allowed to look in their cupboard. That's the language from which we took inspiration to make a deluxe version of Mind Games. We’re rooted in a design vocabulary that my mom and dad already created.' And that design vocabulary is, ultimately, also based on love.

As Sean puts it: 'Mind Games is a bit of a love letter to my mom. Obviously, it's known that they were going through a bit of a tumultuous time in their relationship, that was leading up to this famous “lost weekend”, or whatever people call it. But at the same time: it's clear that my dad never loses focus on the relationship.

'So he does this album cover himself [for Mind Games] – a collage that shows my mom as a giant mountain in the distance that's dwarfing him, and he's this little lost man in the field. It's clear that the most important thing in his life is this monument of a woman, my mother, and he's lost. It's so obvious, visually, what he's saying with the album artwork.’ And what, then, does his mum make of a box set that's a towering monument to her and her late husband's romance, and to their individual and shared art? 'She's retired, so she doesn't want to deal with that stuff anymore,' says Sean.

'But I think she liked it.' Certainly, she’ll have been proud of her son’s victory, with Hilton, at the Grammys on 2 February. Not least because Sean Lennon had to pull double duty that night and represent his dad too. The Beatles won Best Rock Performance for their 'final' track, ‘Now and Then’, a song that arose from a Lennon demo found on an old cassette tape.

As if it wasn’t achievement enough to win the music industry’s leading award for designing a box set that boldly reimagines what album packaging can look like… ‘I was able to accept the Grammy on behalf of The Beatles, which was sweet, because that was not planned in any way. I thought [producer] Giles Martin was going to accept it, but he was not there because of a mix-up. There was no one else there who could have done it – there was no one from Apple.

'So then I ran to the stage because I panicked – I knew that somebody had to go up there! And I actually tripped over my boots!’ says Lennon, a Beatles scion who’s self-effacing to his marrow, laughing again. 'Then I had no idea what to say, because I hadn't planned anything. And I was completely delighted and embarrassed at the same time. But the only thing that matters is that I don't embarrass Paul or Ringo. And they were both very kind to me afterwards about it. That's really all that matters to me. I don't care what anyone else thinks.'

Mind Games (the Ultimate Collection) Super Deluxe Box Set, £1,350, is available at johnlennon.com, along with other Mind Games sets and merchandise