Richard Havers
Historian of pop who wrote a biography of Sinatra and books on the Beatles and Rolling Stones
RICHARD HAVERS, who has died aged 66, was a writer and music historian whose books on jazz, blues and popular music were models of careful research and elegant writing, reflecting his deep passion for and encyclopaedic knowledge of music.
Among his numerous books was an acclaimed biography of Frank Sinatra, volumes on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, histories of the development of blues, jazz and rock and roll, and definitive studies of the storied jazz labels, Verve and Blue Note.
Havers also wrote books on subjects as various as the airline industry, the role of the BBC during the Second World War, football and the sinking of the Titanic – more than 40 books in all, a Stakhanovite output all the more remarkable for the fact that he did not take up writing until he was in his late thirties, following a successful career in the aviation industry.
Richard John Havers was born at Carshalton, Surrey, on April 1 1951. His father, John, worked in the aviation industry and was an airline historian in his spare time; his mother Bettina had worked as a telephone operator at Croydon airport during the war.
After attending Reigate Grammar School, Havers joined British United Airways at Gatwick Airport as a messenger in cargo sales, quickly progressing through the ranks, after BUA’S merger with British Caledonian Airways, to become product manager on the airline’s North Atlantic Routes, and then to develop Bcal’s domestic routes. In 1984 he was approached by Continental Airlines in America to launch their scheduled service between Houston and Gatwick. He would work for Continental for the next six years, building the airline’s UK operation.
Havers enjoyed a reputation as a flamboyant, creative, and at times combative executive. In Houston he painted his office pink, to match his taste in socks and ties, and displayed limited patience for corporate protocol.
At one crowded budget presentation, when the airline’s president questioned a pie-chart that he had prepared, Havers tore the page out of the president’s hand and tossed it in the waste-paper basket before continuing with his presentation as if nothing had been said. He left the company shortly afterwards.
Through his airline connections, Havers moved into promoting concerts for Paul Mccartney and the bands Chicago, America and the Beach Boys, and writing and producing in-flight radio shows. He also launched the first commercial radio station in Turkey.
At the same time he started to pursue his long-held dream of writing about music. He “ghosted” autobiographies by the record producer Tony Visconti, and Take That’s Gary Barlow. He also wrote cultural histories of the Woodstock festival and the Rolling Stones’ 1969 Hyde Park concert, and pictorial histories of the Stones and the Beatles.
In 2001, he ghostwrote Bill Wyman’s Blues Odyssey, an account of a shared journey through the Mississippi Delta exploring the roots of the blues, which won the Blues Foundation’s Award For Literature. In 2003 he co-authored Wyman’s mammoth memoir Rolling with the Stones.
His association with Wyman would lead to Havers later becoming the Stones’ de facto historian, compiling and editing Rolling Stones 50, the band’s anniversary book in 2012, as well as writing a comprehensive account of the group’s early broadcasting history, The Stones on Air
A frequent broadcaster and, latterly, a contributor to the Telegraph’s arts pages, he also worked as the jazz consultant for Universal Music, for whom he compiled and annotated a series of box-sets, including 100 Years of the Blues, Louis Armstrong – Ambassador of Jazz, Ella – The Voice of Jazz, a 10-CD career retrospective of Nat King Cole and extensive anthologies of Verve and Blue Note recordings.
“Richard was like the chancellor of his own university of popular music, with colleges for every genre,” said the Beach Boys singer Bruce Johnston.
Havers was a Falstaffian figure, with a voracious appetite for life reflected in his wide circle of friends, whom he would always greet with a beaming smile and an enveloping bear-hug. A vivid raconteur, he was a popular speaker at arts festivals, where he shared his deep knowledge of music with a contagious enthusiasm.
“Once met, Richard was a friend for life,” the novelist Ian Rankin recalled. “You could talk to him for hours about everything under the sun, he had such a wide range of passions and interests. But he was the most generous and modest of men.”
Living in the Scottish borders, he was an avid campaigner against the development of wind farms in the Lammermuir Hills. Later on he had moved to Somerset, where he served as chairman of the executive board of Visit Exmoor while completing his last book, Ronnie Wood – Artist, about the paintings of the Rolling Stones guitarist.
Richard Havers married first, in 1974, Beverly Mason (dissolved 1993). In 2003 he married, secondly, Christine King, who survives him with two daughters from his first marriage.