Days before the 34th anniversary of the death of Beatles star John Lennon, Sir Paul McCartney opened up about the moment he learned of the shooting of his bandmate and close friend.
BBC News reports that while on the Jonathan Ross Show, McCartney spoke about the feeling of being “very lucky” that he and Lennon had overcome the rift they had gone through and were able to be friends before Lennon's death.
Lennon was killed the night of Dec. 8, 1980, in New York City while standing outside of his apartment. “I was at home and I got a phone call. It was early in the morning…It was just so horrific, you couldn’t take it in and I couldn’t take it in," McCartney recalled.
McCartney said that he and Lennon made up in the mid-‘70s after they both became fathers. While the break-up of the band is the story that is mostly known, McCartney said it wasn’t “the main bit, the main bit was the affection.”
According to The Telegraph, when he talked about the killer, Mark David Chapman, McCartney said the hardest part about his friend being killed was that there was no motive to the attack.
“The phrase kept coming in my head ‘The 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.’”
Top image courtesy of Kristin Callahan/ACE/INFphoto.com