NB: This was originally published on the 29th anniversary of John Lennon's death, in 2009.
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THE last sound I remember hearing on the night of December 8, 1980, was John Lennon's voice. It was jumping and juddering.
I was playing the new album, Double Fantasy, for the first time, having bought it for my friend, Lyn Griffiths, it being her birthday. But there it was, a deep cut in the vinyl, right on the outer edge of the grooves, blighting the opening, optimistic track, (Just Like) Starting Over. Or (the irony), starting over and over and over again.
Never mind, it would go back to WH Smith's tomorrow, after school.
The next sound? News that John Lennon was dead came with the first switch of artificial light on a dark, freezing day.
There she was, my mother, whose early morning presence normally signalled egg on toast. Now she was the messenger, standing over, nervously delivering a blow to break my 15-year-old heart.
I didn't go to school. Nobody would have expected me to.
I took the 10 bus from Old Swan straight back into town to exchange my record. More optimism. “We'll be selling a lot of them now,” chirped the girl in the richly-stocked record department of the Church St store.
"Every cloud!" I might have quipped back on another day.
Instead, I wondered “How could she?”, as the weak winter sunshine emerged and I walked around, in a daze, to Mathew Street, an ignored, dusty alley of fruit warehouses punctuated only by a splodge of Tarmac that had spread itself thickly, like treacle, over and into the bowels of the forgotten cellar that had been, before I was born, “the place where it all began”.
With the Liverpool School of Language Music, Dream and Pun at one end, and a wine merchants flanking the other, there was little clue that this was, in some way, hallowed ground. The old red and yellow Cavern Club sign hung perilously from an empty building opposite, and an Arthur Dooley sculpture “Four Lads Who Shook The World” resided high above the door of Eric's: land of the living and teenage kicking where The Clash would turn up and sing about phoney Beatlemania that had bitten the dust.
Another sculpture, further down the road, was way more relevant to the Zeitgeist of the minute. A bust of Carl Jung. Liverpool was the pool of life, it said. Only then, nobody knew it.
It was about four in the afternoon, and dark, before slumbering Liverpool woke up to the fact that one of its most famous exports had today stopped the world. There would be no texts or tweets to alert them. No media analysis. There was only one shock therapy: wall to wall Beatles on the radio and the prospect of Tony Wilson being vaguely sarcastic about the events of the day on Granada Reports.
Meanwhile, the forgotten Mathew Street was flashing on the world's analogue news radar, rammed, by now, with TV crews. I watched as another of my 14-year-old mates, Oonagh Keating, earned her place in Beatles history by being interviewed for and quoted in the splash on the broadsheet Echo. It would become its most famous Page One, framed and hanging in the editor's office to this day.
Embarrassingly, I ended up blubbing and chain-smoking in the Kensington family home of another school friend whose big brother, Mark McGann, would go on to become an actor and play Lennon, at the Everyman, to great acclaim, and all in the space of the next 12 months. An unthinkable premise at the time. The Beatles, until this point, were so yesterday, in every sense.
There was the grim and strange vigil at St George's Plateau the following Sunday (the feeling was “somebody has to do something”), the pounding drums of Give Peace A Chance bouncing off the North Western Hotel and William Brown St. Then slowly, out of death, the Beatles were reborn and here was a tourist purpose for Liverpool.
The moderately selling 1975 single, Imagine, became a multi-million selling global anthem, unpopular wife Yoko became an honorary scouser and Mathew Street became a festival.
Fifteen years after the day, I reported on the annual New York Central Park vigil, for the Daily Post, before largely putting away the Beatles forever.
I mention all of this because people are asking one another 29 years on, What were you doing when Lennon died? The way a previous generation venerated Dallas, 1963.
There are enough neat endings in the story of Lennon's death. Why wait for next December 8 and a nice round 30th anniversary to get the memory box out? That would be so yesterday.
