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 In 1963, the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, John A.T. Robinson, published a controversial but popular book, "Honest to God", urging the nation to reject traditional church teachings on morality and the concept of God as an "old man in the sky", and instead embrace a universal ethic of love. Bryan R. Wilson's 1966 text "Religion in Secular Society" explained that increasing secularisation led to British churches being abandoned. However, in the US, churches remained popular. Both McCartney and Harrison had been baptised in the Roman Catholic Church, but neither of them followed Christianity. At the start of Beatlemania, the group