Reporter and lifelong Beatles fan Sam Lennon recalls the night of John Lennon's murder in 1980. Sam - no relation - shares his personal recollections of the news that shocked the world.

My sister woke me up with shattering words: "Sam, bad news I'm afraid. John Lennon's been shot dead.

"He was shot outside his home last night. They took him to hospital but he was dead on arrival."

Susan then left my room to bring in the transistor radio providing the news. I lay back in my bed semi-awake and wondering whether she was playing a joke on me.

She was indifferent towards The Beatles and this sounded so impossible.

A few moments later she came back and left me the radio.

I listened and could only say one word to her: "Unbelievable."

Lennon was shot outside his home in New York at about 10.50pm on December 8, 1980. He was 40.

That would have been 3.50am English time on Tuesday, December 9, and I was woken up at about 8am.

Only the radio could break the story early that morning in Britain. There wasn't even breakfast television in 1980, never mind the internet and smartphones.

I was 16 and a sixth former at Acland Burghley School in Kentish Town, north London.

When I walked into school everybody was talking about it, even 11 year-olds who were only born during The Beatles' last couple of years together.

Particularly distraught were some of our teachers who were in their early 30s so would have been teenage fans in the middle of Beatlemania.

Some admitted that they had cried that morning.

One later described how he was still dozing with the radio on. When he heard the report he sat up rigid as if he'd had an electric shock.

Some of us sixth formers were die-hard fans but others dismissed The Beatles as "old" as they had broken up 10 years before.

But the shock was universal. Nobody could understand why this had happened.

In our common room at lunchtime, we gathered around a radio to listen to the updating news reports and tribute comments.

One of the people in that room was Sarah Macaulay the future wife of Gordon Brown, Prime Minister in the late 2000s.

She had left our school for another sixth form but had come back that day to visit friends.

I remember her thoughtfully reading a newspaper report about the shooting and it was the last time I ever saw her. So it was the end of an era in another way.

The first London newspaper to break the news was the evening paper, the New Standard.

That night the TV schedule was saturated with extended news bulletins and tribute programmes.

The reporter for the ITN obituary was Jon Snow, now an anchorman for Channel 4 News.

The BBC TV reporter at the scene in New York was Martin Bell, lately seen on television in a charity advert.

I abandoned my final revision for an English mock exam next day to stay glued to the set.

This dominated all my thoughts - it was all so horrific, unreal and senseless.

I still passed the exam, by the way.

The media in America had been alerted to the shooting well within an hour as a TV journalist, Alan Weiss had been brought to the same hospital as Lennon.

He was hurt in a motorcycle accident and the doctor checking him had to suddenly leave, saying a gunshot victim had arrived.

The two patients were treated just a few feet apart and Weiss soon learned who that other man was.

He alerted his newsdesk by payphone although was not yet able to find out Lennon's condition.

The doctor returned to attend to Weiss after 15 to 20 minutes and Weiss asked if Lennon was now alive or dead.

She refused to say so he reportedly asked: "If someone's brought in with a gunshot, if the person was alive wouldn't you still be needed?"

The doctor's officious mask slipped: "That's an accurate assumption."

Weiss took off back to the payphone.

Lennon had been cut down just as he had returned from a five-year break from music.

There was a terrible irony in some of the songs from his comeback album, Double Fantasy.

Beautiful Boy, for his five-year-old son Sean, had the lines: " I can hardly wait to see you come of age" and: "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."

One of his wife Yoko Ono's songs on that record was called Hard Times Are Over.

There seemed to be an open season by disturbed lone gunmen on famous people during this time. American President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded in March 1981, so was Pope John Paul ll that May.

A month later Marcus Sarjeant, 17, of Capel-le-Ferne near Folkestone, fired blanks at the Queen in London.

By uncanny coincidence, exactly a month before Lennon's murder, a friend asked me if I would cry if one of The Beatles died.

We were discussing how much our idols meant to us.

I didn't but my response was summed up in three words: shocked, sad and angry.

To this day I have never taken the death of someone I never met so personally.

I wrote a long account of the tragedy and the aftermath in a private journal.

It read: "I thought for a minute it was some sort of stupid joke of Susan's. I just couldn't believe he'd died."

I knew I wanted to be a journalist even then and wrote compulsively, including for the school magazine.

Despite the surname I was not related to John Lennon but both our families originated from Dublin.

I actually first became a fan when I was four as my mother had a copy of the album Beatles for Sale. For Christmas 1968 I was given a four-track record with Yesterday.

So I'm old enough to have got a Beatles record when they were still together.

By the 1970s I had forgotten about them until a TV commercial in May 1977 advertised a new live record, The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl.

Just a few seconds each of six songs played, such as Help! and Can't By Me Love, and I was hooked for life.

From 1977 to 1979 I listened to nothing but The Beatles - even though that had been another brilliant time in British music with punk and new wave plus Two Tone.

It was only when I ran out of Beatles records to buy that I opened up to current sounds.

But The Beatles had given enough to insulate me for two years.

There was so much high quality material and it was so varied, as if it was from three or four different bands.

I thought Paul McCartney had a slight edge over Lennon because of his exquisite melodies such as Eleanor Rigby and The Long and Winding Road.

But Lennon was also stunning with songs such as I am the Walrus and In My Life. He was also the most fascinating member of the group, deeply thoughtful and outspoken and incredibly witty and sharp.

The Beatles are considered the most influential band of all time and their popularity continues to this day.

Generations of musicians have since fallen under their spell.

This was particularly stressed by groups such as Oasis during the golden Britpop era of the 1990s.

I interviewed Yoko Ono in September 2014 when she visited Folkestone for the town's Triennial art festival.

She was a contributor to it with a stark poster saying Earth Peace.

Before the meeting, at the Rocksalt restaurant on September 21, her PR people instructed me not to bring up John Lennon.

I thought that was absurd but I got round it by asking if this poster was meant to be in the same style and appearance as War Is Over (If You Want It).

This was the couple's poster campaign in 1969.

She gave a broad smile and said "Yes."

So in some way I was able to bring in Lennon without using his name.

Ono was then 81 but still a busy and active woman, businesslike in the interview but with a sense of humour.

She never commented on my surname.

The murderer Mark David Chapman , now 65, is still in prison in New York state.

He was turned down for parole for the 11th time in August and can't apply again until 2022.

Officials said freeing him "would be incompatible with the welfare of society."

Publicised details of the parole board's 2018 refusal were more specific.

Their letter to him then said he had "admittedly carefully planned and executed the murder of a world-famous person for no reason other than to gain notoriety. "

The officials said he had done it "regardless of pain and suffering you would cause to his family, friends, and so many others.

"You demonstrated a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life."

The Beatles crossed the globe during their career but did not forget Kent.

They first came to the county on January 12, 1963 to play at the Invicta Ballroom in Chatham High Street.

This was the Liverpool group's most southerly concert to date.

They played 12 shows over six days at the Winter Gardens, Margate, from July 8 to 13, 1963.

The band were in Knole Park, Sevenoaks, over three days to film promotional clips for their double A-side single Strawberry Fields Forever/ Penny Lane.

This was on January 30 and 31 and February 7, 1967.

From September 19 to 24, 1967, they returned to the county to shoot for their television film Magical Mystery Tour.

This was at West Malling High Street and airfield.

It included the famous footage for I Am The Walrus.

They returned to the then West Malling Air Station for final filming on October 1.

Lennon and Ono also came to Rochester Cathedral for a fast and sit-in for peace on Christmas Eve 1969.

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