'I'll be around for another 60 years': Lost tapes reveal John Lennon's best laid plans

‘I’ll be around for another 60 years’: Lost tapes reveal John Lennon’s best-laid plans. Only ‘acts of God’ can stop me making music, former Beatle told DJ five years before he was shot dead in New York

John Lennon said he believed he would keep making music for “another 60 years” five years before his death, a newly-unearthed recording has revealed. The Beatles star was shot dead outside his residence in New York in 1980, aged 40.

In the interview, carried out by DJ Nicky Horne in 1975, he said: “Apart from acts of God, I will be around for another 60 years and doing it until I drop.”

Horne recently rediscovered the original recordings in his basement, and elsewhere in the conversation Lennon said he was dissatisfied with his work and wanted to throw away his album Walls and Bridges.

Mark Chapman shot Lennon in the back four times when the musician returned home on Dec 8 1980. Just hours before, Lennon had signed an autograph for Chapman, who remains in prison.   Horne said Lennon had made him feel comfortable by baking him chocolate cookies and insisting on doing the interview cross-legged on the carpet in his apartment.

During the chat, the musician expressed fears that his phones had been tapped by the FBI. He had been an outspoken critic of Richard Nixon at the time.

The Guardian has reported that Lennon said: “I know the difference between the phone being normal when I pick it up and when every time I pick it up, there’s a lot of noises.

“[The administration was] coming for me one way or the other; I mean, they were harassing me. And I’d open the door and there’d be guys standing on the other side of the street. I’d get in a car and they’d be following me in a car and not hiding.”

The full interview is to be aired on Boom Radio at 9pm on Wednesday, on the eve of what would have been Lennon’s 85th birthday.

Source: Craig Simpson/telegraph.co.uk