Music, flowers and candles for Lennon

NEW YORK - Yoko Ono laid flowers and fans lit candles and played songs to honour music icon and peace activist John Lennon, 25 years after he was murdered outside his New York apartment.

In a rare public appearance with fans, Ono laid a bouquet of white peonies on the "Imagine" mosaic in Central Park and blew kisses to the 200-strong crowd, just steps from the Dakota building where the 40-year-old Lennon was shot by Mark David Chapman and where Ono still lives.

"That's the first time I've seen her come, especially in a big crowd. That took a lot for her to do," said a man who gave his name only as Tommy and who has come to the park to commemorate Lennon's birth and death every year since 1980.

Ono, dressed in black and wearing large sunglasses, spent several minutes looking at tributes to her late husband, laid her flowers, whispered a few words and then walked back to her apartment across the street.

In Liverpool, England, where Lennon was born and raised, fans and officials created a shrine beneath a statue of the legendary Beatle and a priest read out a prayer in his memory at a small ceremony.

The city is also holding a memorial service for the man who created some of the world's best-known songs and is considered one of the most influential songwriters of all time.

Friends in Liverpool remembered Lennon with fondness, but felt he distanced himself from them after meeting 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 Billy Kinsley, who knew Beatles Lennon and Paul McCartney in the 1960s.

On Thursday, visitors from Japan and Spain gathered outside the Cavern Club in Liverpool.

"I usually come every year, but this year is very special," said 26-year-old Estefania Soriano from Spain.

In New York, Ono's peonies were added to fans' arrayed flowers, incense sticks, record albums, candles, and homemade posters on the "Imagine" mosaic. Throughout the day, fans brought guitars, basses and tambourines and played Beatles and Lennon songs.

- REUTERS