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Sir Paul McCartney paid a heartfelt tribute to the late John Lennon on what would have been his 84th birthday.
The singer, 82, took to Instagram on Wednesday to share a snap from a 2022 performance of himself on stage with projected footage of John playing the guitar behind him.
The footage was taken from Peter Jackson’s Disney+ documentary The Beatles: Get Back, which aired in November 2021 and followed the making of the band’s 1970 album Let It Be.
Sir Paul captioned the sweet snap: ‘Happy Birthday John. Thanks for being there.’
The sweet tribute comes after Sir Paul revealed he would have been wracked with guilt if he had not repaired his friendship with John before he was tragically murdered in 1980.
Sir Paul McCartney paid a heartfelt tribute to the late John Lennon on what would have been his 84th birthday, sharing a snap of himself performing in front of a video of the late star
John was shot dead at the age of 40 by crazed fan Mark Chapman outside his home in New York City.
He left The Beatles in 1969 and had become embroiled in legal battles over the band’s back catalogue which caused tension between him and his former song-writing partner Sir Paul.
The feud between the two was well documented by the press at the time and, in a 1971 interview, John stated that he could not foresee working with Sir Paul again.
However, the pair managed to get their friendship back on track in the mid 1970s and Sir Paul spent time at the home John shared in New York with his second wife Yoko Ono.
Reflecting on mending their friendship, Sir Paul said on the McCartney: A Life in Lyrics podcast: ‘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.
‘Luckily, we were friendly, we talked about how to bake bread.
‘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.’
The sweet tribute comes after Sir Paul revealed he would have been wracked with guilt if he had not repaired his friendship with John before he was tragically murdered in 1980 (pictured in 1963)
In 2022, Sir Paul said he ‘couldn’t talk about’ John’s death after his murder in 1980.
He detailed how he returned home from the studio the day of his friends death and turned on the TV to see people reflecting on ‘what John meant’ to them.
He said: ‘When John died it was so difficult. It had 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”.
‘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.’
Sir Paul added how he managed to express his grief about losing John in his 1982 song Here Today.
The artist revealed he ‘sat on the wooden floor in the corner with my guitar’ and came up with the opening chords to the track.
The Beatles formed in Liverpool in 1960 and went on to have a string of hits together (L-R: Ringo Starr, John, Sir Paul, George Harrison in 1964)
