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Beatles biographer Hunter Davies: ‘I think Yoko was in love with Paul first’
From holidays in Portugal to walks around Primrose Hill, the 90-year-old knows better than anyone what it was like to hang out with the band
Julia Llewellyn Smith
The Telegraph
Published 08 September 2026
Credit: Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph
Hunter Davies, veteran author and journalist, holds up a pair of navy-and-white swimming trunks that he has pulled out of a plastic bag he keeps in a packed cabinet. “They’re Paul’s,” he says. He means Paul McCartney. “He and Linda stayed with us in Portugal in 1968, and he left his cossie behind. I wrote to him, ‘You idiot! Do you want me to post it?’ He said, ‘Just bin it.’” Davies did not. “When he dies, I’m going to get the DNA out of there and clone little McCartneys.”
Davies is 90 years old. Few living people know better what it was like to hang out with the Beatles – whose surviving members, McCartney and Ringo Starr, are now 84 and 86 respectively. Davies works for four hours every day, including Sundays, and boasts teasingly that he currently has three books on the go.
Credit: Radio Times/Jeremy Grayson
Sixty years ago, he was working for The Sunday Times when he suggested to McCartney – whom he’d previously interviewed – that the biggest band in the world needed a proper biography. “So that when people asked why ‘Beatles’ was spelt that funny way, or why they had that funny haircut, they could say it was all in the book.”
Two years later, the band split up. Davies estimates that around 3,000 Beatles books have subsequently been published. Having spent two years with McCartney, Starr, John Lennon and George Harrison one on one, in the studio and with their families, he had inadvertently become the group’s only authorised biographer.
“When I finished the book, I thought, ‘In 10 years, they’ll be forgotten. In 10 years, somebody will sell more records’ – which Michael Jackson did. But nobody else has come close to the Beatles in influence, or the creativity of their lyrics and music.”
In 1970, however, Lennon told Rolling Stone that Davies’s biography was “a whitewash”. Davies is still wounded by the memory. “That’s an awful story. I rang John up. He said, ‘You know me, Hunt – I say anything that comes into my head. All I was meaning – you didn’t have all the sex. We had orgies, groupies queueing up.’”
Davies shrugs. “I had put in the drugs, and the swearing, but I didn’t put the sex in because they all had wives or regular girlfriends, and I saw no need to embarrass them.” Would he include it today? “Oh, yeah!”
Credit: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images/Robin Jones
He also didn’t touch on the homosexuality of the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. “Brian was a lovely man. He went to the Cavern [Club, in Liverpool, where the Beatles were spotted] because he liked rough trade – blokes who weren’t gay.” Epstein died of an overdose in 1966. Many feel that, for too long, he was written out of the band’s story. “The sadness was, by the time he died, they were like children who’d grown up, and he was the old parent they’d moved away from.”
Davies had a ringside seat to Lennon and McCartney’s notoriously complex relationship. “They loved each other, but they really were competitive. Each one wanted the other’s appreciation.
“I remember when Paul and I came back from a walk in Primrose Hill. Paul played the basic tune of It’s Getting Better, which he’d just written while I was with him. I can still see John’s face, National Health specs on, absolutely blank, betraying no emotion. Paul was waiting for him to say, ‘That’s great.’
Credit: GAB Archive/Redferns
“But he said, ‘That’s good. I’ll try to think of a second verse.’ And he came up with a very cruel one about beating his woman. That’s why it’s a brilliant song, because it turns dark. And that’s why they were the best combination.”
Davies has lost touch with Starr, who now lives in the US, but is still in contact with McCartney, who was always the one he liked best. There was only a temporary blip in their friendship after Linda’s death in 1998, when McCartney remarried model Heather Mills. The couple divorced acrimoniously in 2008, and last year, at a private party hosted by McCartney, Davies was introduced to his third wife, heiress and businesswoman Nancy Shevell. “She was dignified and quiet. And well-off.”
Fans frequently blame Yoko Ono, now 93, with whom Davies is also still in touch, for the band’s break-up. “Of course she wasn’t responsible,” he says with a faint eye roll. “They were so young – they wanted to go their separate ways. John was fed up. George was more interested in the sitar, in spiritual things, and always felt inferior because he was the youngest. Ringo was a bit bored. Paul was the only one who wanted to keep it together. They didn’t fall out. They were very intelligent, sensible people. They’d had their fun, and they wanted to do new things.”
Davies recently donated a priceless stash of handwritten lyrics, letters to and from the Beatles, and 39 notebooks of interviews with them, to the British Library (“next to Magna Carta and Shakespeare and Wordsworth”). Yet his Victorian home in Dartmouth Park, north London – today worth more than £3m (he and his late wife of 55 years, author Margaret Forster, bought it in 1963 for £5,000) – remains a Beatles treasure trove. Its walls are covered in black-and-white shots of the band: some are prints of portraits by Starr, while others were taken during their early days in Hamburg and bear personal inscriptions from the photographer Astrid Kirchherr (girlfriend of Stu Sutcliffe, the band’s original bass guitarist, who died of a brain injury at 21).
All the Beatles visited the Davies household at some point. When Starr came one day in 1968, he asked for vegetarian food. “Margaret did a very poncey Delia Smith aubergine dish,” Davies recalls. “Ringo went, ‘What’s this?’ By veggie, he meant beans on toast.”
Credit: PA Wire/Hunter Davies
And scholars from all over the world trek to north London to quiz Davies, who’s now publishing his fifth book on the quartet, Get Back: The Boys Who Became the Beatles. Surprisingly, though, he has never met director Sam Mendes, who’s directing four films, one about each Beatle, set for simultaneous release in 2028. Do we really need four films about one band? “I can’t believe people will want to see all of them. But the farther away we get from the Beatles, the bigger they become. Until the last syllable of recorded time, someone will be humming a Beatles song.”
Get Back ends at the point when the Beatles release their first single, Love Me Do, in 1962 (a hefty epilogue recalls later incidents). Although Davies has told many of his Beatles stories before, it includes some biography offcuts, including Lennon’s childhood memory of his mother Julia, who’d left him to the care of his Aunt Mimi when he was an infant, then visited John with a bleeding face, allegedly inflicted by her then-boyfriend. Lennon recalled thinking: “‘F--- it. I must get away’… I went to the garden to hide my feelings.”
Credit: Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives
Are there more revelations up Davies’s sleeve? He hints at one regarding Ono. “I believe she was in love with Paul first. But Yoko’s still alive, so I’ll say no more.”
Besides, Get Back isn’t just another Beatles tale: it’s also a social history of the Britain that shaped both the band and their biographer. Like the Beatles, Davies came from a working-class family. His father was an RAF clerk, his mother a housewife. Like Paul and George, he grew up in a council house: he in Carlisle, they in Liverpool, amid post-war rationing. “We all remembered never seeing a banana, and assuming eggs would come dried.”
All benefited from the new National Health Service, not just John for those specs, but also Ringo who, after developing peritonitis aged six, had spent a year at the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital. Davies, along with John, George and Paul, attended grammar school (where Lennon failed all his O-levels and was effectively expelled). Davies became one of only 4 per cent of the population to attend university, going to Durham, where he edited the student newspaper and subsequently made his way south to Fleet Street.
Seven decades on, Davies is “still surprised” by the middle-class lifestyle he enjoys. He has holiday homes in the Lake District and the Isle of Wight, and takes regular holidays in the Caribbean. In fact, he’s heading off shortly to Bequia, an island in the Grenadines, with his latest girlfriend, aged 80. “My children hate it,” he says unrepentantly, “when I talk about my sex life.”
Credit: Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph
Could he have attained this today, in a world where most grammar schools have been abolished and university education, though far more widely available, has a huge price tag attached? “I was lucky,” he says, “starting work in the 1960s. People like me got their chance. There was so much money, so many jobs, and old Etonians were prejudiced against in favour of people from my background.
“There’s no comparison with life and opportunities now. Obviously, there’s terrible poverty, and the haves are even have-ier than they used to be. But today, except in certain Jilly Cooper circles, people can rise regardless of their education and accent, and not be prejudiced against.”
Davies didn’t want to be known only as the “Beatles man”. He has written more than 100 books; his other projects have included ghost-writing the autobiographies of footballers Wayne Rooney and Paul Gascoigne, and writing The Glory Game (1972), a now-classic study of his favourite London football club, Tottenham Hotspur. “I spent a year in the Spurs dressing room. I heard the plates flying. You couldn’t do that today, because they’ve all got accountants, lawyers and PRs.”
The memory returns us to his two years with the Fab Four. “When Paul and John were having a row, I’d think, ‘Oh, God! What if they suddenly say, “What are you doing here? Get out!”‘ And I’d think, ‘Well, if that happens, I’m still so lucky to have had the experience.’”
Get Back: The Boys Who Became the Beatles (Ebury, £25) will be published on September 17
