Maureen Cleave, British journalist who championed the Beatles, dies aged 87

Maureen Cleave, the British journalist best known for her profiles of the Beatles, has died aged 87 after a short illness.

As one of the few young journalists given scope to write about the pop explosion of the 1960s – and with her inquiring, non-deferential tone – Cleave helped to kickstart the British music journalism that flourished in her wake.

Her most famous encounter came with John Lennon in 1966, who told her: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first, rock’n’roll or Christianity.” His statements outraged God-fearing Americans and damaged the band’s popularity – after their tour of the States later that year, they never toured in the US again. Lennon later wrote: “If I hadn’t said the Beatles were ‘bigger than Jesus’ … well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas.”

Born in India in 1934 and later raised in her mother’s native Ireland, Cleave studied at Oxford and was hired as a secretary at London’s Evening Standard following graduation. She persuaded the newspaper’s editor to give her a column on pop music, entitled Disc Date. It enabled her to visit Liverpool in 1963, where she documented the growing Beatlemania in a piece headlined Why the Beatles Create All That Frenzy.

In the coming years she continued to write about the group, and befriended them. She later described them as “more fun than anyone else and terrible teases. The interviewer was outnumbered four to one: they might put your coat in the wastepaper basket, offer to marry you, seize your notebook and pencil, pick you up and put you somewhere else, demand you cut their hair … On the other hand, they were often kind, offering you cigarettes or a swig from their bottles of Coke, making sure you never got left behind.”

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She rewrote a line of A Hard Day’s Night: “I find the things that you do / Will make me feel all right” updated Lennon’s more laboured “I find my tiredness is through / And I feel all right”. Lennon later claimed that Norwegian Wood was written about her and that he and Cleave had had an affair, but Cleave denied it and Lennon later recanted, saying he could not remember who it was about.

In September 1966 she married her husband Francis Nichols, whose work took the couple to Peru for a spell in the late 1960s. After returning to the UK, Cleave continued her journalism career, also writing for the Daily Telegraph, Observer and others.

Cleave was diagnosed with ME in the 1990s, and later with dementia after her husband’s death in 2015. She is survived by their three children.