London - A song by John Lennon, released for the first time yesterday on what would have been the former Beatle's 60th birthday, appears to contain a premonition of his death at the hands of "the angel of destruction".
Help Me To Help Myself, a piano-accompanied ballad, appears on a digitally remastered version of Double Fantasy, the last album he recorded before he was shot dead outside his New York apartment by Mark Chapman in 1980.
The song includes the lines: Well I tried hard to stay alive,/ But the angel of destruction/ keeps on hounding me, all around./ But I know in my heart that we/ really never parted, oh no.
Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, had kept the recording private for 20 years. "With Double Fantasy, I thought it would be an ideal opportunity to introduce one of John's still unheard tracks," she said yesterday.