Four shots rang out and John Lennon fell. Now, on the 25th anniversary, DJ Andy Peebles tells of the happy man he interviewed two days before the murder that shocked the world. David Charters reports
NOBODY recognises him on the famous old street, where once they stacked fruit cartons and the girls sitting on them left lipstick stains on their cigarette tips.
Anyway, most of the passing people are foreign tourists, hunched in the bitter chill, but still awestruck enough to pose for pictures in front of John Lennon's statue, as the rain turns to hail and strange purple streaks web the sky.
But the stocky figure with the broad shoulders walking, head down, straight towards the Grapes pub on Mathew Street has a little bit of history to tell.
He was the last man on earth to speak at length to Lennon.
There was a time when you would have recognised Andy Peebles. He was on TV and in the papers a lot in the hours after Mark Chapman shot Lennon dead outside the Dakota building in New York.
Fate had turned the hours of interview taped for Radio 1 between Peebles and Lennon into news, and that news turned into popular history.
Peebles sits down on a padded bench seat in the Grapes. It has not changed much since Lennon drank here.
The Cavern is only a few yards up the street, now cluttered with office girls "doing" lunch with their pals. Forty years ago their counterparts would have been heading for the cellar, clinking on the cobbles in their high-heeled boots, to break the humdrum routine by listening to a group. Times change.
Peebles, 56, is chinking the ice cubes in his tumbler of cola, as he recalls that permission for the trip to New York was only granted by the BBC bosses when he had secured an interview with David Bowie, playing the Elephant Man at the Booth Theatre off Broadway.
"We had tickets to see him on the Friday night and a meeting with Yoko at the lunchtime," says Peebles, who is married to Anne, 53, and has a stepdaughter Sarah, 22.
