Death of a Beatle

At around the very time that I was conceived, an event occurred that was to send the Western world into shock and mourning. On the 8th December 1980, across the Atlantic from the place of his birth - and the place of my impending life – John Lennon was shot in the back four times in New York City and was pronounced dead on arrival at the nearby Roosevelt Hospital.

It has been twenty-nine years since the death of one of the most successful singer-songwriters ever to have lived, but it is an anniversary I still comemmorate with countless others throughout the world. The Beatles have been the largest single influence on modern songwriters today.

I often ask myself what it would have been like had John Lennon lived to a ripe old age like Paul McCartney, but I know, and always have known that even at the age of 40, Lennon had reached his expiry date. Somehow, when I think of the song “When I’m Sixty-Four”, I can imagine Paul losing his hair, sitting by the fireside, but John Lennon’s existence was so full of creative angst and tortured emotions that it was almost impossible for him not to become immortal by dying a tragic death.

Growing up, my entire life from the age of about five was affected and influenced by the Beatles. My brother decided to take up the guitar at school, and our headmaster, Mr. Hill, was a huge fan of the Beatles. Simon came home from school one day with a tape Mr. Hill had given him, and I remember that the first song we listened to was Strawberry Hills. From that moment onwards our home in North Yorkshire became an effective shrine to the Beatles. When my brother taught me to play the guitar soon after he took it up, it was mostly the Beatles that we were playing.

I recall when he obtained a book which contained the concise anthology (music and lyrics) of the Beatles’ works. On the front cover were pictures of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr. There was something about Lennon, though, that was different from the rest, a piercing look that the others didn’t have. Simon asked me which Beatle was my favourite and I remember being devastated when he told me that out of the four band members, I had to pick the one that was dead.

As I grew up, my passion for the Beatles - their music and their lives - was never tempered. I devoured as much information about them and the period that I could lay my hands upon.

I know every single lyric from every single song. I wished and longed to travel back in time just to wallow in the glory that came from their songs being on the charts. This was perhaps one of the reasons I was such a loner growing up – I have always felt that I was born in the wrong decade.

Yes, Lennon is a true and typical immortal. A man with an intensely troubled childhood, he was determined to make his name in music. But upon achieving superstardom, the pressures and pitfalls of fame almost destroyed him. After leaving the Beatles in 1969, Lennon’s new identity and life as a somewhat unconventional anti-war activist, influenced greatly by his equally eccentric wife, artist Yoko Ono, brought him once again into the spotlight.

Just eleven years later his life was taken by an apparently deranged fan, Mark David Chapman, who had been stalking Lennon for months. The world continued to turn, the sun continued to shine and the mountains, for the most part, stayed where they had been put. But perhaps little pieces of Lennon’s soul flew into places where they could not be erased, and I would like to think a little piece of him embedded itself into the depths of the heart that would belong to me.