It was a “Hard Day’s Night” for John Lennon, according to his former bandmate.
Sir Paul McCartney reminisced on his past while looking at old photos of him and his former Beatles bandmates during a conversation with Conan O’Brien at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival — and shared that John Lennon had a “tragic life.”
O’Brien, 60, displayed photos from McCartney’s new book, “1964: Eyes of the Storm,” during an hour-long sit down for the “Storytellers” series, which will be a future episode of O’Brien’s podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.”
The photos included candids of Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. One image displayed showed Lennon sitting in the backseat of a car, and O’Brien noted that he looked anxious and vulnerable in the photograph.
“I don’t know about the anxiety, but the vulnerability is very true,” McCartney, 80, said.
“[John] had a really tragic life,” he continued. “As a kid, his mother was decreed to not be good enough to bring him up…His father had left the home when John was three. So that’s not too wonderful. John grew up with these sort of little minor tragedies through his life.”
“It made me realize why he had that vulnerability. I always admired the way he dealt with it because I’m not sure I would deal with the stuff he went through that well.”
Lennon died on Dec. 8, 1980 at 40 years old when he was shot outside his home he shared with his wife Yoko Ono in New York City by Mark David Chapman.
The book contains 275 mainly unseen photos taken by McCartney during the height of The Beatles –between the end of 1963 through early 1964.
“It’s so lovely for me to see these memories and just remind me of where we were, what we did in those days,” McCartney shared. “What I love about (the photos) is the innocence. We didn’t know we were going to (become) famous. We really wanted to be (famous), but we didn’t know.”
McCartney recently announced that “the final Beatles album” will be released this year — using Artificial Intelligence technology to “extricate” Lennon’s voice from a previously unheard track to create the music.
“We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would normally do,” the singer told the BBC.
McCartney did not specify the name of the track, it is speculated to be titled “Now and Then” which was composed by Lennon before his death.
At the end of last year, the former Beatles frontman revealed why he “couldn’t talk” about Lennon after his tragic death — saying in an interview with Sirius XM’s The Beatles Channel that the sudden loss “hit me so much that I couldn’t really talk about it.”
“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,’” he continued.
“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 too deep. I couldn’t put it into words.”
In April 2022, McCartney utilized technology — though not AI — to honor his late friend at the Spokane Arena for the first show of his “Get Back” tour — by bringing him back to life for a duet.
Footage of Lennon from director Peter Jackson’s Disney+ documentary “The Beatles: Get Back” played on the big screen behind McCartney while he sang, resulting in a beautiful duet of “I’ve Got A Feeling.”
