Daily Mail, August 26, 2016 We were in Canada when John Lennon told me he’d left the Beatles. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was just before Christmas, 1969, and a few nights earlier, while discussing his Beatles’ song lyrics on the phone, he’d suddenly invited me to join him and Yoko in… Continue reading…
Much of my Beatles journalism has now been collected in “THE Ray Connolly BEATLES ARCHIVE” which is now available on Amazon. Most books about the Beatles are by writers who never met them. I was lucky. I was a journalist and I was there. I knew all of them, John Lennon confiding in me during… Continue reading…
Daily Mail, August 7, 2015 You would never have called it glamorous. Based in a couple of stifling, barrel arched cellars beneath a fruit and vegetable warehouse, eighteen steps down from a cobbled alleyway just four blocks from the River Mersey, it didn’t have a single pretence to sophistication. But to a teenage Cilla Black, by… Continue reading…
You will go a long way before you meet anyone who knew her who won’t have a kind word to say about Cynthia Lennon, the first wife of John Lennon, who died, aged 75, in Majorca yesterday. Because she was just a very, very nice person who, as a teenager, fell in love with a… Continue reading…
Daily Mail, 22.4.15 Yoko Ono no doubt meant well when she said last weekend that Ringo Starr was the ‘most influential Beatle’, but, bless him, he wasn’t. Not in any way, shape or form. And he would readily admit that. Certainly he wasn’t the most influential musically, because his contribution could have been made by… Continue reading…
Feb 7, 2014 When Pan Am flight 101 left London’s Heathrow bound for New York on February 7, 1964, the pilot would have had a pretty good idea of the local value of four of his passengers. With Beatlemania at a hysterical crescendo in Britain, hundreds of over-excited teenage girls had turned up at the… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 6.1.14 John and Paul had their rows that lasted for years, Paul and George certainly had their musical differences, and George was furious with John on more than one occasion. But Ringo? Apart from a famous altercation in 1970 when John and George deputed the drummer to carry some bad news to Paul… Continue reading…
Mail Online 28.11.13 They don’t make many girls like Freda Kelly any more. They really don’t. But, then, her attitudes were forged in an age that’s past, a monochrome time of shining, cobbled Liverpool streets, of girls from the typing pool whose highest ambition was to become a secretary because that was pretty well the… Continue reading…
There was shock and disappointment in the west of Scotland this week when an absentee landlord told two employees that, after decades of service, they won’t be needed on his farm after Christmas. From the employees’ point of view this is obviously upsetting. But when the landlord is Paul McCartney and the farm is on… Continue reading…
Daily Mail, February, 2013 We’ve all said things we’ve immediately and eternally regretted, and a sudden, thoughtless, inexplicable quip made when 14 year Paul McCartney was told that his mother had died, has haunted the former Beatle ever since. “What will we do without her money?” the teenage Paul blurted, not knowing how to handle… Continue reading…
