John Lennon: See Paul McCartney Fight Back Tears Over Death Of Best Friend 34 Years Later [Video]

John Lennon died on December 8, 1980, and 34 years later his legendary songwriting partner, Beatles bandmate and best friend Paul McCartney has trouble looking back on the tragedy without getting choked up, as McCartney showed in an interview on Britain’s Jonathan Ross Show Saturday.

McCartney met Lennon when both were teenage schoolboys in July of 1957 in the Liverpool, England, suburb of Woolton. McCartney joined a band formed the previous year by Lennon, then called The Quarrymen. The two quickly began collaborating on original songs — an unusual step for young musicians in that era. Their band later changed its name to The Beatles and the rest is both musical and cultural history.

After defining a decade and a generation with their music and personal style throughout the 1960s, The Beatles broke up in 1970, largely over bitter differences regarding the band’s business affairs. Lennon moved from England to New York City in 1971.

But on December 8, 1980, as he returned from a recording session to his home in the city’s famed Dakota apartment building at 72nd Street and Central Park West, a deranged gunman named Mark David Chapman lay in wait and shot Lennon, wounding him fatally.

While McCartney, whose solo career made him the world’s most successful rock musician in the 1970s, frequently reminisces about Lennon in interviews, he has rarely discussed the moment he heard of his friend’s death. But the 72-year-old Beatle, appearing on Ross’s program, two days before the 34th anniversary of Lennon’s death, became emotional when remembering what happened that day.

“I was at home and I got a phone call. It was early in the morning, I was in the country and I just got a phone call and it was like — I think it was like that for everyone — it was just so horrific,” McCartney recalled. “You couldn’t take it in and I couldn’t take it in and I just for days you just couldn’t think that he was gone.”

McCartney fought back emotion as he recalled the difficulty of relaying the terrible news to his then-wife Linda and their children.

While McCartney said that the bitterness over The Beatles’ breakup lingered for several years, he and Lennon healed their rift in the mid-1970s, after both became fathers.

“I’m so glad because it would have been the worst thing in the world to have this great relationship that then soured and he gets killed, so there was some solace in the fact that we got back together. We were good friends,” said McCartney. “The story about the break-up, it’s true but it’s not the main bit, the main bit was the affection.”

Watch Paul McCartney discuss the death of John Lennon on the Jonathan Ross program in the video excerpt, above.