Liverpool and New York honoured pop icon John Lennon yesterday with floral and musical tributes and a candle-lit vigil close to where he was shot dead 25 years ago.
In a ceremony in the centre of the northern English city where John Lennon was born and raised, fans and officials created a shrine beneath a statue of the legendary Beatle, gunned down in New York by a fan in the presence of his wife Yoko Ono.
Later in the day, the city held a memorial service for the man who created some of the best-known tunes in pop and is considered one of the most influential songwriters of all time.
In New York, hundreds of mourners were expected to gathered at the Strawberry Fields section of Central Park and light candles at 10:50 p.m. EST (3.50 a.m. GMT today), the time Lennon was shot.
Friends in Liverpool remembered John Lennon with fondness but also felt he distanced himself from them after meeting Yoko Ono, the woman whom many fans blame for breaking up The Beatles in 1970.
"You couldn't approach John at the end, and looking back it was from the moment... he met Yoko Ono," said former friend and fellow musician Billy Kinsley, who knew Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the 1960s.
"It was sad. He was my hero from when I was a 15-year-old kid, and he was always approachable, always said hello, and had a little chat. But after he met Yoko, that went out the window completely."
His assessment of John Lennon and The Beatles as musicians, however, has never changed.
"It really did make a big impression on me seeing The Beatles on that first night at the Cavern, because it just changed my outlook," he told Reuters in a makeshift recording studio in his garden, recalling the night in February 1962.
"I thought 'My God, I have just seen the best thing that I could ever see', and since then it's been downhill because I've never seen anything as good as The Beatles."
Mr Kinsley performed Beautiful Boy, which John Lennon dedicated to his second son Sean on his Double Fantasy album, at the memorial service in Liverpool yesterday.
In New York, Ayarton Dos Santos was at the Imagine mosaic, named after one of John Lennon's most famous songs, just as he has been nearly every day for the last 13 years to arrange petals, acorns, apples and bagels into a peace sign.
"It's all about peace, love and happiness. It's for brother John," Mr Dos Santos, 41, said.
"You come here, you feel his spirit. His spirit is so alive in here," he added.
Yet the man who brought a generation such pleasure with seminal tracks like Strawberry Fields Forever, Give Peace a Chance and Imagine, also caused pain to those who loved him.
Both his first wife Cynthia and their son Julian recently voiced their sense of rejection when John Lennon left them for Yoko Ono.
Cynthia told Reuters earlier this year that she and Julian were "airbrushed" from The Beatles' story and that Ms Ono made it clear she did not want her in New York after John Lennon's death.
In a statement on his website, Julian added: "I have always had very mixed feelings about Dad. He was the father I loved who let me down in so many ways... it's painful to think that his early death robbed me of the chance for us to know each other better".
Ms Ono's spokesman Elliot Mintz said he had received more than 500 requests for interviews with John Lennon's Japanese-born wife.
"It's just too painful for her to discuss," he said.