British journalist who befriended The Beatles
Maureen Cleave 1934-2021
Maureen Cleave, who has died aged 87, was the first Londonbased journalist to alert the world to Beatlemania. It was in early 1963 that a friend tipped her off about a band that was sending fans wild in Liverpool. Her piece, Why the Beatles Create All That Frenzy, came out two weeks after the release of the Fab Four’s second single, Please Please Me, said The Daily Telegraph. Delighted with the exposure, they invited the 28-year-old former debutante into their circle. Known to them as “Thingy”, she accompanied them to their first London concert at the Palladium, and in 1964 she joined them on their first trip to the US. “For two years they were out of breath,” she recalled. “They ran to escape screaming mobs of frightening harpies. ‘Come on, Thingy,’ they’d roar at me, as I pelted after them.”
John Lennon took a particular shine to her: he admired her “look” – she wore “outré” red boots but no make-up – and her prose, and accepted her criticism of his work. In 1964, for instance, she found him jotting down lyrics for A Hard Day’s Night. One read: “But when I get home to you/I find my tiredness is through/And I feel all right.” She told him it was a bit feeble, so he quickly changed it to: “I find the things that you do/Will make me feel all right.” He gave her the amended lyrics as a memento. Later, though, she inadvertently caused him considerable trouble: it was to her that he made the fateful remark that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now”, during an interview for a profile called How Does A Beatle Live? He was making a point about the decline of Christianity in the West, and in Britain the comment barely raised an eyebrow. But when the article was picked up in the US on the eve of a tour there months later, all hell broke loose, and The Beatles never toured again. Decades later, Cleave noted that had Lennon had a “PR man at his side, the quote would never have got into my notebook, let alone the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations”.
Born in 1934, the daughter of an army officer, Maureen Cleave was raised in her mother’s native Ireland, before winning a place at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She was presented at court in 1955. On graduating, she joined the Standard as a typist, but was soon promoted to a column called Disc Date. Her early interviewees included Terence Stamp; then her friend Gillian Reynolds – later a distinguished journalist herself – tipped her off about The Beatles, and she went north to meet them. They were, she recalled, “more fun than anyone else”: Lennon was “imperious, unpredictable, indolent... charming and quick-witted” – not unlike the hero of the Just William books he adored. She severed her links with The Beatles in 1966, the year she married Francis Nichols, having by then seen at first hand the impact of fame. Paul McCartney handled it best, she said; by contrast, she’d ring Lennon and find that he was so cut off from real life, in his “daft” house in Weybridge, he didn’t know what day it was. She continued to interview famous musicians, however, in a career that lasted 40 years.