John Lennon’s haunting last interview with a radio DJ

Andy Peebles was a BBC Radio 1 DJ when he conducted the last interview with his hero John Lennon, just before the fatal shooting. It haunted him for the rest of his life.

Andy Peebles (left) with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in New York in 1980. Peebles conducted the last interview with the former Beatle. Picture: PA Images via Getty.

Andy Peebles, radio presenter, born London, December 13, 1948. Died March 22, 2025, aged 76.

When Andy Peebles flew home from New York on the PanAm flight to Heathrow on December 8, 1980, he settled into his first-class seat with an air of satisfaction as he ordered a glass of champagne. In his luggage were the tapes of John Lennon’s first interview for British radio in years. With Yoko Ono at his side, the former Beatle had talked in frank and candid fashion about his life for more than three hours. When the tape recorder had finally been turned off, Lennon and Ono took Peebles for a celebratory dinner at Mr Chow, the finest Chinese restaurant in Manhattan.

Although he was an experienced disc jockey and a seasoned interviewer, Peebles admitted that when he had flown to New York five days earlier, he had never been more nervous. Lennon, whom he had not met before, had always been his favourite Beatle – nay, his hero – and, like many fans, Peebles was deeply suspicious of Ono, with whom his first task was to negotiate the terms of what Peebles was and was not allowed to ask.

Lennon was in a loquacious and generous mood. Nothing was off limits and the interview was a triumph. “We bonded and out it all came,” Peebles recalled. “He told such great stories – about his childhood, his deep passion for Liverpool, his lifelong “sibling rivalry” with Paul, the Beatles’ time in Hamburg, finding Yoko and his evolution into a more feminist, nicer person, how he loved living in New York and how much he missed England.”

The interview was an exclusive that would make Peebles the envy of every other DJ, interviewer and chat show host in Britain. Yet when his plane touched down at Heathrow at about 6am, a shock of seismic proportions awaited. While Peebles found a pay phone to call his mother and let her know that he was home, Paul Williams, the BBC producer who had accompanied him on the trip, called his wife, who gave him the news that Lennon was dead, shot outside his home in the Dakota building.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney in London, in October 1965, when they received their OBE’s at Buckingham Palace.

He conveyed the news to a shaken Peebles, who was even more distressed when he realised that he had walked past Lennon’s killer, Mark Chapman, who had been one of the “fans” outside the Dakota building when he had turned up to agree the parameters of the interview with Ono. Two uniformed policemen then escorted Peebles to the BBC’s airport studio where he did a live interview for Today on Radio 4. “I felt numb but I am public school, stiff upper lip, so I got on with the job,” he said.

He then made his way to Radio 1 where he was given breakfast and shoved into another studio to do a live on-air tribute to Lennon with John Peel. After returning home to change his clothes but still without any sleep, a chauffeured car took him that evening to appear in a live Old Grey Whistle Test special. Halfway through the tribute, the red desk light started flashing. It was Paul McCartney, who announced: “Thank you for doing a wonderful job. Linda and I are watching.”

Days later, Peebles received a call at the BBC from the former Beatles producer George Martin, who asked him to come to his studio on Oxford Circus. When he arrived, McCartney was waiting for him. “He needed me to reassure him that John still loved him, despite all the post-Beatles fallings-out,” Peebles remembered. The interview had still not been broadcast, the BBC deciding that it would seem exploitative to have transmitted it in haste, so he told McCartney that Lennon had talked about him and had been “sarcastic, funny and irreverent but there was no doubting his fondness for you”. McCartney could not help shedding a tear.

Peebles was equally affected by the way Lennon’s death had inadvertently turned him into a celebrity whom everyone wanted to interview and came close to a breakdown. “I lost all sense of self-worth in the aftermath. It blighted my life and stunted me. The obsession nearly drove me mad. I tormented myself with survivor’s guilt,” he said. “He was the creator of some of the most brilliant music of the 20th century and I was nobody.”

He was not nobody, of course, and after his interview with Lennon was finally broadcast in January 1981, he remained one of radio’s most familiar and best-loved voices for another 40 years and more. He stayed with Radio 1 until 1992, presented Top of the Pops and interviewed numerous other personalities on air, from David Bowie and Mick Jagger to three prime ministers and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Lennon and Ono in a SoHo gallery, New York, November 26, 1980: one of the settings for a promotional video for their Double Fantasy album. Picture: Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images.

Peebles was born in 1948 in Hampstead, north London, to Mary and Robert Peebles, a head postmaster, who died when he was 11. He was 15 when the Beatles’ debut album was released.

He became the drummer with the Rivals, a school band playing covers of Lennon and McCartney songs, and studied hotel management but was “sidetracked”, as he put it, by DJing. He joined Radio 1 in 1978.

Shortly after his interview with Lennon had been broadcast, he began receiving long phone calls from Ono and whenever he was in New York she asked to meet up.

When the BBC organised a Lennon tribute on the first anniversary of his death, Ono insisted she would only talk to Peebles.

He came to believe that she was using him and was highly critical of what he viewed as her “professional widow” act. “She used John’s death to hype her own new record and she compared his killing to the assassination of John F Kennedy, and herself to Jackie Onassis,” he told the Daily Mail. “Out of nowhere, we had ‘Brand Lennon’ and John would have loathed everything about it.”

On the 40th anniversary of the murder, in 2020, he was widely sought again for a fresh round of interviews, including the documentary Lennon’s Last Weekend. “I have carried his murder around like excess baggage, as though it were my fault,” he said. “I can usually reason my way out of such dark thoughts. But John haunts me. He has never left my side.”

THE TIMES