Daily Mail 14.10.16 You’ve got to give it to him. Even at the age of seventy five Bob Dylan can still really get up people’s noses. Back in the Sixties it was the establishment of politicians and big business he irritated when his first hits were anti-war and anti-prejudice songs of youthful protest. Today it’s… Continue reading…
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…
Fifty Years On …. or what Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, Michael Caine, Leonard Cheshire, Paul Raymond, Eric Morecambe, Mick Jagger, Terry Wogan, Elvis Presley, Dennis Hopper, David Attenborough, Lord Hailsham, Tony Benn, Charlie Watts, Enoch Powell, Marc Bolan and Jimmy Savile and many more told me… There are many good reasons… Continue reading…
It isn’t every day that you spot a multi-millionaire travelling on the London Underground. That isn’t usually the style for men who are famous all around the world, who have swanky houses, dozens of gold records, and a long list of the phone numbers of beautiful blondes in their old address books. But that’s what… Continue reading…
For a writer some of life’s experiences are just too vivid and life changing not to find their way into print – and often into fiction, too. And so it was with the filming of one of my early novels, Trick Or Treat? For everyone involved, that movie was a disaster, with less than 30… Continue reading…
At high tide the waves from the Atlantic really rush in at Beg Legeur in Brittany’s Bay of Lannion. It’s a pretty little out of the way place, with its yellow gorse and scattered groups of French families; a good spot for a holiday. But, as I watch my grandchildren play in the surf, I… Continue reading…
Professional footballers up and down the country did what they are paid to do over the weekend. They tried to score goals, and when some of them succeeded their various team mates rushed to engulf them in euphoric tangles of arms, legs and kisses. Why such passion? They play twice a week. A goal isn’t… 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, April 7, 2016 Do you have a favourite year in music? Most of us do. We tell ourselves that songs and records were better at a certain time in our lives, and that their lyrics spoke to us in a way that other songs at other moments failed to do. And they probably… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 17.3.2016 Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. It must. How else can I understand that next on April 16, Plum and I will have been married for fifty years. It doesn’t seem possible. I always thought golden wedding anniversaries were for old people. But we’re not old. We were young only the other day.… Continue reading…
