Maureen Cleave obituary

The interviewer Maureen Cleave, who has died aged 87, wrote the first notable newspaper article about four “fresh young jokers” from Liverpool, titled “Why the Beatles Create All That Frenzy”, for the Evening Standard in 1963. Three years later, her interview with John Lennon detonated the “Jesus controversy” in the US. Lennon told Maureen in 1966 that the band had become “more popular than Jesus. I don’t know which will go first – rock’n’roll or Christianity.”

As the band embarked on a 14-city tour, fans across the Bible belt burned the group’s records and mementoes on public bonfires in outrage and, by the year’s end, the Beatles had decided never to play in public again.

Maureen said: “John was certainly not comparing the Beatles with Christ. He was simply observing that so weak was the state of Christianity that the Beatles were, to many people, better known. He was deploring, rather than approving, this.”

She said later that Lennon had intended to be ironic. Lennon himself actually thanked Jesus in a book published by Yoko Ono in 1986: “If I hadn’t upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas.”

Such was the trust Maureen enjoyed with the Beatles that the Fab Four frequently sought sanctuary from the screaming hordes at her London flat in Maida Vale. Since Ringo Starr had once revealed that, wherever they toured, the only place secure from fans was the bathroom of their hotel, the Standard wittily photographed them with her in Maureen’s bathroom for a street poster.

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“Lennon was the most interesting of them,” Maureen wrote, “imperious, unpredictable, indolent, disorganised, childish, vague, arrogant and very good at answering back.” And yet he also listened. In 1964 Lennon showed her the lyrics for A Hard Day’s Night scrawled down on a birthday card that had been sent from a fan to his little son Julian: “When I get home to you / I find my tiredness is through …” “Rather a feeble line about tiredness,” she said. Lennon borrowed her pen and wrote instead: “When I get home to you / I find the things that you do / Will make me feel all right.” Three hours later, the record was made. Today Julian’s birthday card is in the British Library.

From 1970, Maureen and I worked together for many years on Fleet Street papers, where she became one of the most exacting and entertaining interviewers in an era when some journalists became as well known as their subjects. Maureen, however, remained the invisible woman. Clearsighted and persistent, she was a stickler for accuracy while pursuing “an incurable nosiness inherited from my mother”.

She much preferred interviewing non-celebrities, eschewing actors and politicians “because they’ve said it all before”. Instead she sought to question remarkable men and women about their inner resources.

One of the most fascinating that sticks in the mind was published in 1979. “A Brahms concerto can take a heavy toll of a piano,” she learned from the Steinway piano technician Bob Glazebrook, who visited London’s concert halls to tune the instrument chosen by a great performer for that night’s show. Ashkenazy? The 481. Barenboim? The 770. He could recognise a model playing on the radio, such as the 730 on tour with Elton John in Moscow. “I don’t think it was tuned all the time it was there,” said Glazebrook.

In an interview in 1980 the Oxfordshire headteacher DF Goldsmith told Maureen his golden rule: “Do not bore the boys. Never let them know what you’re going to do next.”

In 1983 Maureen found that the Guinness heiress Aileen Plunket “carried a rush basket with her diary, address book and fine lawn handkerchief. There are baskets all over the house and she sorts things from one to the other.”

In 1985 Little Richard talked of his childhood in Georgia where “the kids played in the dust on the ground. It was the colour of my skin … The dirt was the same colour as we were.”

The same year, the chairman of the National Vegetable Society, Donald Maclean, told Maureen that he grew the largest collection of potatoes in private hands in the world. He enthused: “Catriona 1924, the old established queen of potatoes, reigns supreme.”

Maureen’s top tip was: “Take notes and be seen to be taking notes because it inspires trust. You’d be appalled by the number of interviewers who rely on their memory for recall. No wonder people complain about being misquoted.” She always read a draft of her articles over the phone for her subject to factcheck and said Lord (Max) Rayne, the former chairman of the National Theatre, was the only person to withdraw permission for publication as a result.

Born near Delhi, India, Maureen was the elder daughter of an Irish mother, Isabella (nee Browne), and an English father, John Cleave, a major in the 7th Rajputs. In 1940 Isabella and Maureen were returning to India after a visit to Ireland when their ship, SS City of Simla, was torpedoed.

Maureen documented this drama in the Telegraph magazine in 1999. She remembered being rescued, aged six, after six hours in a lifeboat and someone with a mouth organ playing Tipperary. “Not once does my mother mention what she felt,” she wrote. She conceded that Isabella “was the best possible mother for a journalist: honest, observant and imaginative … When she told you a story she gave you the facts, no wasted words.”

After schooling at Rosleven in Ireland, Maureen studied history at St Anne’s College, Oxford, from 1954. There she became the first woman invited to speak at the Oxford Union debating society.

Maureen said recently that in the 1950s, even with a degree from Oxford, a woman was expected to go into secretarial work. Hence she went to the Evening Standard in 1958 initially as secretary to the editor. When Charles Wintour took the helm in 1959, Maureen insisted that the paper needed a page devoted to younger readers, and he asked her to write it.

She was soon delivering a weekly pop column called Disc Date, guesting on the weekly TV panel show Juke Box Jury and becoming a chronicler of 60s London with a regular “Maureen Cleave Interview”. Wintour described her as one of his two “absolutely favourite writers”.

Maureen married one of her university admirers, Francis Nichols, in 1966, which prompted the Beatles to send a telegram. The couple spent three years in Peru, and moved from London to his family home, Lawford Hall in Essex, when his mother, Phyllis, died in 1972. There Francis settled as an arable farmer. Maureen continued freelancing into her 70s for the Telegraph magazine, Saga magazine, the Observer and Intelligent Life.

Francis died in 2015. Maureen is survived by their three children, Sadie, Dora and Bertie.