We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That’s what people forget. … They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom.

We looked into each other’s eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other….It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away. There’s something disturbing about it. I would walk out into the garden - ‘Oh no, I’ve got to go back in.’ In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. “I’d just had enough after about four or five hours. John was quite amazed that it had struck me in that way. John said, ‘Go to bed? You won’t sleep!’ - ‘I know that, I’ve still got to go to bed.’ But of course you don’t just sleep off an acid trip so I went to bed and hallucinated a lot in bed. I remember Mal coming up and checking that I was all right. ‘Yeah, I think so.’ I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange.

I liked Brian [Epstein]. I had a very close relationship with him for years, like I have with Allen [Klein], because I’m not going to have some stranger running the scene, that’s all. I was close with Brian, as close as you can get with someone who lives sort of the fag life, and you don’t really know what they’re doing on the side. But in the group I was closest to him. He had great qualities and was good fun.

I talked to Yoko the day after John was killed and the first thing she said was, ‘John was really fond of you, you know.’ It was almost as if she sensed that I was wondering whether he had… whether the relationship had snapped. I believe it was always there. I believe he really was fond of me, as she said. We were really the best of mates. It was really ace.

I’ve always thought there was this underlying thing in Paul’s ‘Get Back.’ When we were in the studio recording it, every time he sang the line ‘Get back to where you once belonged,” he’d look at Yoko.

I definitely did look up to John. We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest.

I’d like to think that all the old Beatle fans have grown up and they’ve got married and they’ve all got kids and they’re all more responsible, but they still have a space in their hearts for us.