Maureen Cleave Maureen Cleave Maureen Cleave (born October 20, 1941) 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". Five months later,
More popular than Jesus voted to cancel it rather than have "municipal facilities be used as a forum to ridicule anyone's religion", and also saying, "the Beatles are not welcome in Memphis". The Ku Klux Klan nailed a Beatles album to a wooden cross, vowing "vengeance", with conservative groups staging further public burnings of Beatles records. The Reverend Jimmy Stroad stated that a Christian rally in Memphis "would give the youth of the mid-South an opportunity to show Jesus Christ is more popular than the Beatles". The Memphis shows did take place, on 19 August; the afternoon show went as planned, but there was