Lennon: 30 years on

This business of it being decades since important milestones happened continues to bewilder me. Surely it can't really be 30 years since John Lennon was shot dead in New York - although it would have been 30 years tomorrow morning since I found out by listening to the Today programme on Radio 4.

I thought I'd share with you four things to mark the occasion, 3 songs and an article.

Tom Brook was a young BBC reporter and one of the first on the scene at the Dakota Building. Here are his memories of that night. Obviously it's very poignant, but one of the things I found interesting about it is the description of  what he had to do  to get the audio back to London. We have come a long way in 3 decades.

In terms of the songs, one of my favourite Beatles songs, untypically for someone who generally goes towards the cheesy, is Come Together, partly because the story tickles me. The title was inspired by the campaign slogan for Timothy Leary, the US psychologist who experimented with psychedelic drugs when he decided to run for governor of California against one Ronald Reagan in 1960. A wee conviction for possession of Marijuana brought that campaign to an end. I remember reading that Lennon said that although the song was inspired by the Leary campaign, it wasn't much of a campaign song. Err, quite. Anyway, it tickled my fancy and is available on You Tube here

You couldn't do anything about John Lennon without thinking of his iconic song Inagine. Is there anyone who isn't word perfect on it? So simple and compelling.

And then, finally, from the last album before he died, Double Fantasy, Woman. I just love it - one of my favourite songs ever.