Hunter Davies with Paul McCartney and Linda Louise Eastman

Memoirs from the outside looking in

Hunter Davies has written about the The Beatles and famous footballers. Now he has turned to the subject of himself, writes Dan Carrier

THE banging on the door was getting louder and more frantic. It was very late and Hunter Davies decided to ignore it. But whoever was outside was not going to take No for an answer. order this book
The writer was renting a house in Portugal that had a small wooden door leading onto the beach. He assumed it was a drunken fisherman, until a Scouse accent bellowed out: “Wake up Hunter Davies, you lazy bugger.”
Hunter had recently completed the official biography of The Beatles and had been in contact with the band since, sending them the odd letter from the Algarve and getting the occasional reply.
And now Paul McCartney had decided, on a whim that very evening, to take a quick break with his new girlfriend Linda and chose to make an unexpected visit on the Davies family.
McCartney had hired a private jet and landed in Faro airport armed only with £50 and a bottle of whiskey. He handed the money to an airport official, asking him to change it, then jumped in a cab, without collecting the Portuguese notes.
“He didn’t have any cash to pay the taxi driver,” recalls Hunter. “I had to search the house to find money to pay the fare.”
Such vignettes litter his memoirs. Published this month, the Dartmouth Park-based columnist, biographer and novelist has hundreds of tales.
He has met and interviewed some of the biggest names of popular culture from the early 1960s when he left his native Cumbria to seek his fortune in London, working for the Sunday Times, Punch and the New Statesman, and writing scores of books, both factual and fiction.
The list of people is too numerous to mention: he has had private tete a tete’s with prime ministers, including Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Tony Blair, hob-nobbed with literary giants including black American novelist and civil rights icon James Baldwin, and met artists such as David Hockney.
He has also, as a football lover, been fortunate enough to write the biographies of two of the most talented English footballers of modern times – Paul Gascoigne and Wayne Rooney.
And although it is titled Football, The Beatles and Me, Hunter Davies manages to thread skillfully not only the paths that led him to recording studios of Abbey Road and the dressing room at White Hart Lane to write the story of a season at Spurs, but a domesticised world of Kentish Town.
“When my wife and children heard what I was planning, they each said the same thing: ‘Oh no, spare us’,” he says.
“I haven’t witnessed any of the grand public events of my lifetime from the inside, only the outside looking in, so I can’t offer any unique insights or first-hand accounts of the political, social or economic events of my times.
“In my private life nothing truly remarkable has happened, and the awful things, when they did happen, have been awful things which have happened, alas, to hundreds of thousands of others.”
He adds: “I’ve learned nothing about myself in doing this book, except how lucky I have been, which I knew already, and what a lousy memory I have for people’s names and dates,” he says
His family has never been far from his writing. His Father’s Day column, published in Punch for 10 years, charted the growth of his three children. It was eventually made into a TV series – with John Alderton, complete with Hunter’s trademark moustache.
But it was the Beatles book that he is perhaps best known for.
He admits he didn’t pay much attention to Love me Do, and John Lennon’s version of Twist and Shout “gave me a headache”.
But he liked other songs of theirs and, crucially, identified with them for other reasons. He too was a northerner and had a similar background.
“I identified with their background, their grammar schools and council houses,” he recalls. “They were near my age – I was just four years older than John – and they seemed to be singing songs for me, about our experiences.”
By 1966, Hunter was running the Atticus column on the Sunday Times. As he points out, the column can be seen as a barometer of change, mark of the cultural pressure that was brought to bear by people like Hunter during the time.
Instead of it being about ‘Society’, as the column had traditionally focussed on, it was now pointing its spotlight to the people who were at the forefront of the new wave of music, art and literature that defined the decade.
Hunter was impressed by the lyrics of Eleanor Rigby and went to see Paul McCartney. They discussed the song and realised they had a lot in common.
He had an idea: what about a proper book about the Beatles, “a serious attempt to get it all down once and for all, so that in the future when people ask the same dopey questions, he could say it was in the book”.
Paul told Hunter to go to Brian Epstein for permission, and the band agreed it was a good idea.
It meant he got to spend 1967 hanging out with The Beatles – and that in itself has to be worth a memoir alone.

• Football, The Beatles and Me by Hunter Davies, Headline Books, £18.99.