YOKO ONO LENNON: John once described his wife as ‘the world’s most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does’. Having moved into dance records with the last song John produced for her, ‘Walking On Thin Ice’, Yoko continues to record and has had several number one hits on the US Dance Chart. In 2015 New York’s Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective exhibition of her avant-garde early work. After John’s death she began an eight-year relationship with her interior designer, Hungarian Sam Havadboy. She has never remarried. Losing touch with her daughter, Kyoko, in 1971, when her second husband, Tony Cox, absconded with the eight-year-old child, Yoko did not see her again until 1994 when Kyoko got in touch. The two are now reconciled.
SEAN LENNON: Partly privately educated in Switzerland, Sean later dropped out of Columbia University to focus on his avant-garde music. A singer/songwriter, he plays guitar, drums, piano and keyboards, and lives with his girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Mulh in New York.
JULIAN LENNON: An avid collector of Beatle memorabilia, after first making a career as a singer/songwriter, Julian is now more interested in photography and documentary film-making. He lives in Monaco.
CYNTHIA LENNON: Life wasn’t always easy for Cynthia following her divorce from John, and after several business failures she had to auction many mementoes of her years with him. Married a further three times, she died at her home in Majorca in 2013 with her fourth husband, Noel, and her son Julian at her bedside. She was seventy-five.
MIMI SMITH: A few days before he was murdered, John called his aunt, telling her that he was homesick and looking forward to coming back to England. After his death Mimi was upset to discover that the house John had bought her in Sandbanks, Dorset, had still been in his name and had therefore become the property of Yoko Ono. She died there in 1991, after which the house was quickly sold and demolished.
SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY: Paul is one of the most successful songwriters of all time, as he continues to write, record and tour the world. Three times married and the father of five children, his first wife, Linda, died of breast cancer in 1998.
GEORGE HARRISON: All his life George loved to make music, and following the break-up of the Beatles he had a successful solo career before co-founding the Traveling Wilburys in 1988 with Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. After George and his wife Pattie divorced in 1977, he married Olivia Arias the following year, with whom he had a son, Dhani. George died of lung cancer in 2001, aged fifty-eight.
RINGO STARR: The only Beatle with whom all the other three played in their later careers, Ringo overcame a problem with alcohol in the Eighties and has since forged a second career as Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band. Divorced from his first wife Maureen, who died in 1994, aged forty-eight, and with whom he’d had three children, he now lives in California with his second wife, actress Barbara Bach.
PETE BEST: Sacked by the Beatles in 1962, Pete didn’t see or speak to any of the other Beatles for forty-five years. In the mid-Sixties, in a deep depression, he tried to commit suicide. His brother, Rory, and mother, Mona, found him, after which she gave him ‘the most angry and sensible talking to I’ve ever had in my life’. Following that he worked for twenty years as a civil servant in Liverpool, before returning to drumming in 1988, and occasionally touring with the Pete Best Band.
MAY PANG: After John left her in 1975, May remained in touch with Paul McCartney and her friends Cynthia Lennon and Freda Kelly, the Beatles’ fan club secretary. Married to record producer Tony Visconti in 1989, the couple divorced in 2000. They had two children. May now lives in New York.
NEIL ASPINALL: Having started out as their road manager, Neil stayed with the Beatles through a variety of roles before becoming the chief executive of their company Apple Corps from which he retired in 2007. He died of lung cancer in 2008.
SIR GEORGE MARTIN: Continuing to work into his eighties, George also produced the group America, Celine Dion, Neil Sedaka, Cheap Trick, Elton John and hundreds of other artists. During his career he won six Grammies and an Oscar. He died, aged ninety, in 2016.
PETE SHOTTON: After falling out with John over Yoko’s demands, Pete co-founded the Fatty Arbuckle diner chain in the UK, eventually selling his share for £5 million. In 1997 he joined the reformed Quarry Men with whom he still enjoyed playing the washboard – as well as a guitar. He died of a heart attack in 2017. He was seventy-six.
HARRY NILSSON: A multi-talented man, from early computer programmer to a singer-songwriter with a three-and-a-half-octave range, Nilsson never had the success and fame his brilliance deserved. Profoundly affected by the death of John, he later joined the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and made appearances for gun control fund-raising, donating record royalties to that cause. His lyrics to the song ‘1941’ were the inspiration for the film That’ll Be The Day. Married three times, and with a total of seven children, he died of a heart attack in 1994.
PHIL SPECTOR: Brilliantly successful record producer though he might have been, Phil Spector had a dark side. And in 2009 he was sentenced to ‘nineteen years to life in prison’ for ‘using a firearm in the commission of a criminal act’, after actress Lana Clarkson was found shot dead at his Los Angeles home.