Paul McCartney Remembers the Day John Lennon Died

It has been 42 years since John Lennon was murdered, and his former Beatles bandmate Paul McCartney recently opened up about what he remembers from the day the music icon died. McCartney sat down for an interview with The Beatles Channel from SiriusXM and shared, “When John died it was so difficult. It had hit me so much that I couldn’t really talk about it.”

The “Let It Be” writer went on to recall, “I remember getting home from the studio on the day that we’d heard the news he died. Turning the TV on and seeing people say, ‘Well, John Lennon was this’ and ‘What he was, was this’ and ‘I remember meeting him.’” McCartney then added, per ET Canada, “I was like, ‘I can’t be one of those people. I can’t go on TV and say what John meant to me.’ It was just too deep. I couldn’t put it into words.”

McCartney later spoke about “Here Today,” a track from his 1982 album Tug of War, and shared how Lennon’s death shaped the song. “I was in a building that would become my recording studio, and there were just a couple of little empty rooms upstairs,” he explained. “So I found a room and just sat on the wooden floor in a corner with my guitar and just started to play the opening chords to ‘Here Today.’”

In a past Rolling Stone interview, Beatles drummer Ringo Starr spoke with Foo Fighter’s frontman Dave Grohl and opened up about when he heard the terrible news of his bandmate’s death. “When John went, I was in the Bahamas,” Starr shared. “I was getting a phone call from my stepkids in L.A. saying, ‘Something’s happened to John’. And then they called and said, ‘John’s dead’. And I didn’t know what to do.”

Starr also confessed that he never really got over Lennon’s murder, saying, “And I still well up that some bastard shot him. But I just said, ‘We’ve got to get a plane.’ We got a plane to New York, and you don’t know what you can do. We went to the apartment. ‘Anything we can do?’ And Yoko just said, ‘Well, you just play with Sean. Keep Sean busy.’ And that’s what we did. That’s what you think: ‘What do you do now?’”