Maureen Cleave (born 1934) is an English journalist who worked for the London Evening Standard from the 1960s conducting interviews with famous musicians of the era, including Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Over the next 40 years, she continued as a distinguished interviewer of people in all walks of life, in the Standard, the Telegraph Magazine, Saga magazine, Intelligent Life magazine, and elsewhere. In her Standard interview with Lennon on 4 March 1966, titled “How does a Beatle live?”, she quoted him as saying that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now”. (More from Wikipedia)
“We’re more popular than Jesus now.”
This might be the most provocative statement ever made by a rock star – and that is saying something. The above quotation is by John Lennon in March 1966, back when the Beatles were alive and well, when he was interviewed by journalist Maureen Cleave for the British newspaper, the London Evening Standard. Unlike the usual routine, Cleave interviewed each of the four Beatles individually rather than collectively.
John Lennon himself had been reading extensively about religion before making his ill-advised statement, and Maureen Cleave noticed a copy of The Passover Plot by Hugh J. Schonfield on his bookshelf during her interview. This scholarly work, which was published in 1965 (and informed many of Lennon’s views toward Christianity), was the Da Vinci Code of its day and portrayed Jesus and His closest disciples as having planned the events leading to the Crucifixion so that He could be taken down from the Cross after a few hours by well-connected individuals (such as Joseph of Arimathea) before He was actually dead and then nursed back to health.
In a 2005 reminiscence by Maureen Cleave, called “The John Lennon I Knew” (published in The Daily Telegraph), she recalls a 1978 interview (as reported in Wikipedia) where Lennon said: “If I hadn’t said [that] and upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas! God bless America. Thank you, Jesus.”
(September 2014)
