IMAGINE IF HE'D LIVED

Three days before he was gunned down, John Lennon complained about his critics — saying they were just interested in "dead heroes", "What they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean. I'm not interesting in being a dead (expletive) hero. .. So forget 'em, forget 'em."

It has been 30 years, today, since Dr Stephan Lynn was called back to work at Roosevelt Hospital in New York to help with a gunshot victim. ''It wasn't until a nurse looked inside his wallet for identification that we realised who it was,'' he told the New York Daily News. It was John Lennon although in grey-faced death he looked nothing like he had in life, the doctor recalled. The former Beatle had been shot four times in the back by Mark David Chapman, to whom Lennon had given an autograph at the same spot outside his Central Park West apartment earlier that evening.

Chapman eventually pleaded guilty to the murder and is locked up in Attica Correctional Facility after his sixth attempt at parole failed this year. His actions left the heart of one of the greatest musical icons of the century in Lynn's hands, who, the Daily News said, found it ''empty and still''. ''I … massaged it to see if we could restore some cardiac function, to see if we could get it beating again, to see if perhaps with giving him some blood we could get something started,'' he said. ''Nothing worked.'' Lennon would have been 70 this year, but Yoko Ono, with him when he was shot, told The Times he had not liked to mark the passing of time. The appeal of his music has not faded.