Paul McCartney's relief after mending friendship with John Lennon before he died

20 October 2023 , 16:31

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Paul McCartney is glad he made up with John Lennon (Image: Getty Images)

Sir Paul McCartney would have been left on a “big guilt trip” if he hadn’t reconciled with John Lennon before the rock icon was murdered.

Lennon was shot dead by crazed fan Mark Chapman outside his home in New York on December 8, 1980 at the age of just 40. Lennon had quit The Beatles in 1969, and legal battles over the band’s back catalogue created growing tension between the former songwriting partners.

But the pair reconnected in the mid-1970s, spending time with each other at the New York home Lennon shared with second wife Yoko Ono. McCartney, 81, admits he would have been haunted by his friend’s death if they hadn’t shared those moments. He said: “It was super, super painful, there was a lot of navigation of emotions to be done.

"In the end it was something I was very glad of, when he got murdered, that I’d had some really good times with him before that happened. It would have been the worst thing in the world had he just been killed and we still had a bad relationship. That would have been a big guilt trip for me.

Lennon pictured in New York three years before his death (Getty Images)

"Luckily, we were friendly, we talked about how to bake bread.” Speaking on the A Life In Lyrics podcast, he said: “You’ve got to remember I sued him in court, I sued his friends from Liverpool, life-long friends, in court. There’s a lot of getting over that has to be done.”

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The pair fired barbs at one another in songs like McCartney’s Too Many People and Lennon’s How Do You Sleep? which all stemmed from the legal fight. The other Beatles, Sir Ringo Starr and George Harrison, had taken the side of Lennon and his manager Alan Klein against Macca.

But McCartney knew he was right to cut unscrupulous manager Klein out and ultimately the other three Beatles agreed. Recalling the moment he knew he was going to have to sue his friend, Paul said: “John appeared and he went, ‘I’ve just been to see this guy Alan Klein in the Dorchester…I think this guy is great and by the way I’m leaving the group.’ This was basically how all of that happened.

“The other two went with John, so it was looking as though Alan Klein was going to own our entire Beatle empire. It was an idea that I was not too keen on. I just thought, ‘No, this guy has got such a bad reputation.’ I had to fight them for my bit of The Beatles and, in actual fact, for their bit of The Beatles which many years later they realised and almost thanked me for.”

Mark Jefferies