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fete where Paul met John in 1957? Would anyone really care exactly how many steps led down from Mathew Street into the Cavern Club? F. ScottFitzgerald’s comparison of writing with swimming underwater returned to me often in those days, as the seventies staggered toward their end. Like others of my generation I remembered how very different the last months of the previous decade had felt, how the joss-scented sunshine, with Abbey Road playing through every open window, had promised to go on and on forever. We hated to leave the sixties, but everyone seemed to want out of the seventies: to forget flares and platform heels, sideburns and socialism, and stride boldly into the new high-tech Tory utopia of the eighties promised by Margaret Thatcher.
    Ironically, the cusp of the eighties brought the strongest ever speculation about a Beatles reunion. In Kampuchea, formerly Cambodia, millions of refugees were fleeing the war between the country’s Vietnamese invaders and Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge. Over Christmas 1979, it was announced that Paul McCartney would headline a series of concerts at London’s Hammersmith Odeon cinema to aid the Red Cross and UNICEF relief effort. When George and Ringo indicated willingness to join Paul onstage, feverish excitement broke out in newsrooms across the hemispheres. But John in New York quickly stamped on any idea that he might complete the reincarnation. Even a personal plea from the United Nations’ secretary-general, Kurt Waldheim, could not move him. “We [the Beatles] gave everything for ten years,” he said. “We gave ourselves . If we played now, anyway, we’d only be four rusty old men.”
    A few months later a song came on the radio that sounded vaguely like John—and was John, though you had to listen twice to recognize the voice, purged of anger and wrapped in a relaxed early-sixties-ish, Motown-ish beat. And soon afterward, there he was in the flesh, neither ill nor bald, revealing how he had decided to opt out of the rat race and had spent the past five years as Yoko’s “househusband,” caring for their new son, Sean. Despite the New Man aura, here was the old John, as dry, droll, and helplessly honest as ever. Here he was describing how a sudden urge to create music again had sent him back into the studio to make Double Fantasy , an album with Yoko, celebrating their later life together; here he was being photographed with her in the nudity that had seemed grotesque ten years earlier, but now seemed only natural and rather touching. Here he was age forty, seemingly reborn and “starting over” as the song said, celebrating the first step into middle age, the end of the seventies, the joys of parenthood, the rediscovery of his art, andthe continuing freshness and interest of a love affair that, against the whole world’s wishes, seemed to have lasted.
    I delivered my manuscript to my British publisher in late November 1980, with a warning that there might be more to come. With John so accessible and talkative again, I had high hopes of persuading him to see me before the book went to press. That hope disappeared with a phone call from a friend in New York in the early hours of December 8.
    The scale of the grief after John’s murder was—and remains—something unique in modern times. Unlike the mourning for John F. Kennedy seventeen years earlier, it was not confined largely to the victim’s own homeland. Unlike that for Diana, Princess of Wales, seventeen years later, it had no taint of hype or media manipulation; no sense, as in the Diana aftermath, that people were reacting in a distorted, even dysfunctional way. It was an utterly spontaneous and genuine outpouring of misery across continents by those who felt they had lost an intimate, inspirational friend. I particularly remember the broken voice of a young New Yorker during the candlelit vigil outside the Dakota: “I can’t believe John’s dead… he kept me from dying so many times…” In a