“I was sitting on my chair, in the middle of the room, when Yoko walks in and grabs a microphone,” recalls photographer P.J. van Sandwijk of shooting today’s photo series. “Sean [Ono Lennon] counts off, the band starts and she starts singing, full of energy. It was captivating.” This series of pictures of the Japanese artist, musician, activist and Beatle widow with her son and his girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Muhl, and Berlin-based electro absurdist Peaches, was taken while the Plastic Ono Band rehearsed for the polymath’s 80th birthday celebration concerts in Berlin earlier this year. The photographs are showing at the exhibition Yoko Only at Blacks in London’s Soho at a time when Yoko-mania is at its highest. Ono is the subject of a retrospective at Louisiana gallery on Denmark’s east coast that runs until September, and is the principle curator of this week’s Meltdown Festival at the UK capital’s Southbank Centre, which includes a show by Peaches tonight and culminates in this Sunday’s performance of the 1980 album, Double Fantasy, the last that she recorded with her husband John Lennon. Obsessed with the work of William Claxton, Dennis Hopper and Hiroshi Sugimoto, today’s featured photographer Van Sandwijk was born in the Netherlands in 1987 and has both Dutch and English nationality. “Yoko wrote the song ‘Yes, I’m a Witch’ [in the 70s] after everyone attacked her, and I admire that greatly,” he says. “If there is a lesson I learned from being in her presence, it is the following: Be inspired by the beauty around you. Be creative. Do it.”