World remembers Lennon 25 yrs on

Liverpool (England): Liverpool and New York honoured pop icon John Lennon on Thursday 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 Lennon was born and raised, fans and officials will create 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.

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 gathered at the Strawberry Fields section of Central Park and lit candles at the time Lennon was shot.

Friends in Liverpool remembered Lennon with fondness, but also felt he distanced himself from them after meeting Ono, the woman who 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 Lennon and Paul McCartney in the 1960s.

His assessment of Lennon and the Beatles as musicians, however, has never changed.

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"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," Kinsley said.

Lennon lives on

Kinsley will perform Beautiful Boy, which Lennon dedicated to his second son Sean in his album Double Fantasy, at a memorial service in Liverpool on Thursday.

In New York, Ayarton Dos Santos will be at the Imagine mosaic, named after one of 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.

"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 and 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 Lennon left them for Ono.

Cynthia said earlier this year that she and Julian were "airbrushed" from the Beatles' story and that Ono made it clear she did not want her in New York after Lennon's death.