HUNTER DAVIES: WHY I DIDN´T TELL THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT THE BEATLES

Hunter Davies admits he played his part in continuing the band's carefully cultivated image.

I can’t remember where I was in 1971 when I first read Jann S Wenner’s brilliant interviews in Rolling Stone magazine with John Lennon. (They later came out as a book, which is still in print, and are probably the best interviews John ever gave.) I do remember a bit of jawdropping admiration and, yes, jealousy that Wenner had managed to get so much out of him. He’d obviously caught John at a good moment, when he was raging against the world in general and the Beatles in particular. He said that their manager Brian Epstein had forced them into suits and that they’d “sold out”. And he attacked Paul: “When Paul was feeling kind, he’d give me a solo.” Most of all, he rubbished himself, saying what a bastard he had been.

I was enjoying all this when Wenner suddenly asked John about my book, The Beatles: the Authorised Biography, first published in 1968. “Well, it was really bullshit,” said John. He went on to explain that had omitted“the orgies and shit that happened on tour” and that I had allowed his aunt to take stuffout. It was the word “bullshit” that jumped out. I’m sure it gave huge pleasure to all theother Beatles hacks at the time but over the years it has largely been forgotten.

I barely remembered how hurt I had been at the time until, several times in the past few weeks, I was asked about that “bullshit” remark. A Polish TV crew, a German presenter and an Australian radio interviewer all dragged it up. Then, blow me, there came a fourth reference, by the charming but deadly Mariella Frostrup on Radio 4’s Open Book. It wasn’t to the word  “bullshit” or directly to Wenner’s interview but she did ask why I hadn’t given details of all the groupies. After all these decades.

In 1971, I rang John up in New York shortly after the interview appeared and he just laughed. “You know me, Hunt, I just say anything that comes into me head.” And it is true that he admitted to Wenner that he often doesn’t make sense. “We all say a lot of things that we don’t know what we are talking about. I’m probably doing it now . . .”

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