Paul McCartney Recalls “Horrific” Moment He Learned of John Lennon’s Death

The legendary Beatles front man, 83, opens up about receiving the shocking news, which was delivered via a phone call from his manager “early in the morning” on December 8, 1980, as reported by Us Weekly. McCartney immediately struggled to comprehend the event. “It was just too lit,” he recalls in the book, describing the moment as a chaotic blur.

To illustrate the sheer gravity of the shock, McCartney compares the tragedy to another pivotal moment in history. “It was the same as the Kennedy [assassination]. The same horrific moment, you know. You couldn’t take it in,” he writes, adding that the passing of decades has done little to dull the pain or provide closure. “You couldn’t take it in. I still haven’t taken it in. I don’t want to.”

Lennon died at age 40 after Mark David Chapman shot him outside The Dakota, his apartment building in New York City.

While the former songwriting partners had a famously tumultuous relationship in the years leading up to Lennon’s death, McCartney does cherish the fact that they had reconciled before tragedy struck.

“That is a nice thing, a consoling factor for me, I do feel it was sad that we never actually sat down and straightened our differences out,” he admits. “But fortunately for me, the last phone conversation I ever had with him was really great, and we didn’t have any kind of blowup.” 

According to Relix, the restoration of McCartney and Lennon’s friendship often revolved around “normal stuff” like sharing bread-making recipes and bonding over fatherhood in the late 1970s.

McCartney’s memoir, which uses his former band Wings as a lens to explore the decade after the Beatles, is an oral history that includes interviews from the McCartney family as well as numerous Beatles and Wings collaborators. The book also features the vantage point of Paul’s daughter Stella McCartney, who also shared her recollection of the moment her dad received the devastating news of Lennon’s death. 

“I remember the biggest reaction I’d ever seen from a phone call, and him leaving the kitchen and going outside,” Stella, 54, said. “I admit it breaks my heart to this day. That was truly heartbreaking to see. I’ve got that footage in my head for my life. I’ve captured in my head the moment Paul McCartney found out that John Lennon had been murdered.”

Paul also revealed how he and his then-surviving Beatles bandmates — Ring Starr and George Harrison — processed the shocking news: by going to the studio. 

“Nobody could stay home with that news,” he recalled. “We all had to go to work and be with people we knew. Couldn’t bear it. We just had to keep going. So, I went in and did a day’s work in a kind of shock.”

After the Beatles officially broke up in April 1970, all four members pursued solo careers with McCartney eventually releasing seven albums with his band Wings. As mentioned earlier, McCartney and Lennon had a turbulent relationship following the Fab Four’s split, but Paul remains forever grateful that, despite all the bumps in the road and harsh words aimed at each other, they eventually buried the hatchet.

“One of the great blessings in my life is that we made up,” Paul writes. “We’d loved each other all our lives, and we’d had our arguments and we’d called each other names. But it had never got any more serious than two brothers in a family.”