Paul McCartney Reflects on John Lennon’s Death: ‘It Was Just So Horrific’
During a recent appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show, Paul McCartney recounted how he found out about the death of John Lennon. The Beatle was murdered outside of his New York City apartment 34 years ago today.
“I was at home, and I got a phone call,” McCartney told the talk-show host. “It was early in the morning…. I think it was like that for everyone. It was just so horrific that you couldn’t take it in – I couldn’t take it in. Just for days, you just couldn’t think that he was gone. So, yeah, it was just a huge shock and then I had to tell Linda and the kids. It was very difficult. It was really difficult for everyone. That was like a really big shock, I think, in most people’s lives. A bit like Kennedy, there were certain moments like that.”
Ross then related that it was a shock for him as well, but that he didn’t know him. “Yeah, for me it was just so sad that I wasn’t going to see him again, and we weren’t going to hang out,” McCartney said. “And, for me, the biggest thing was that the guy who took his life, the phrase kept coming to my head, ‘Jerk of all jerks.’ It was just like, ‘This is just a jerk.’ This is not even a guy politically motivated. It’s just some total random thing, some guy going, ‘Hey,’ bop.”
In a lighter moment on the show, McCartney also told a story about reliving the iconic, street-crossing cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road. “I’ve always wanted to recreate it, and I do often think, you see some Japanese fans, I think, ‘I’ll just hop out,'” he said. “But this Halloween, we’d been to a Halloween party at my daughter Mary’s, and I had this amazing werewolf mask that scared the little grandkids and I had to take it off for them. Anyways, I’m going home and I’ve still got this big mask on. And we got to the crossing, so I got, ‘We’ve got to do it.’ And it’s like 11 o’clock.”
McCartney’s wife Nancy got her camera and the former Beatle held up traffic to take a shot. “I’m there with the werewolf thing and this guy looking very annoyed [in a car],” McCartney said.
In other McCartney news, the singer recently made a video for his song “Hope for the Future,” which appears in the video game Destiny. It features the singer-songwriter as a hologram appearing around the galaxy depicted in the game. McCartney also recently put out a 3-D video of his song “Live and Let Die,” which he recorded during his concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.