I’m desperately sad to record the passing of Peter Trollope, a great journalist and my collaborator and friend.
Peter did the background research for six of my 10 music biographies, (John Lennon. Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison) and performed brilliantly every time.
In recent years he’d had numerous major health problems, but continued working tirelessly - indeed, had been itching to get started on our next project, a new biography of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein.
We never worked together in person, since he lived in Altrincham, Cheshire and I live in London. Ours was mainly a telephone and e-mail relationship, yet none the less warm for that.
Writing the lives of pop stars can be a lowering experience, but Peter constantly reinvigorated me with his wonderful research coups, his fierce intelligence and bone-dry wit.
When we joined forces in 2003, he’d had a distinguished career with Merseyside’s evening paper, The Liverpool Echo, then with the northern BBC and Granada Television.
During his 18 years on the Echo, he was successively its news editor, crime reporter and chief feature writer, winning several national and regional journalism awards.
But he found his true milieu in exposing the dubious practices of some Liverpool City Council members, undaunted by threats that his legs would be broken if he didn’t back off.
He also found time to write a pop column and get on friendly terms with some of music’s greatest names. Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes To Hollywood would ring him just for a chat
One day while walking his dog in rural Cheshire he happened to encounter Paul and Linda McCartney out horseback-riding.
‘Aha!’ said Macca with real respect. ‘It’s Trollope of the Echo.’
Switching to television, he exchanged reporting for producing legendary hard news programmes like Granada’s World In Action and Inside Out.
World In Action’s largest-ever audience, 10.3 million, watched his documentary about fellow broadcaster Lynn Faulds Wood’s fight against bowel-cancer.
I wasn’t the first author to experience Peter’s formidable investigative skills, though I was the first to fully appreciate them.
In the mid-80s, he was approached by the American academic Albert Goldman to work on Goldman’s biography The Lives Of John Lennon.
However, he baled out when it became clear that Goldman was writing a comprehensive hatchet-job on Lennon, much of it his own malevolent invention.
Albert Goldman’s loss was my inestimable gain.
To list all Peter’s investigative triumphs for my books would need a book of its own so I’ll mention just one. Not about the Beatles, his Mastermind subject, but the Rolling Stones.
In 1967, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were busted for drug-possession at ‘Redlands’, Richards’s Sussex cottage.
The story for years afterwards was that the police had been tipped off about their presence by Britain’s then most scurrilous tabloid, the News of the World, to derail a libel action Jagger was bringing against it, and was certain to win.
In fact, the informer was a mysterious American known as ‘Acid King David’ also staying at Redlands, who’d vanished immediately after the raid and never resurfaced subsequently.
Peter traced him to Los Angeles, where he’d worked as a fringe actor and video producer under the name David Jove until his death in 2004.
But the Trollope masterstroke was finding an Englishwoman named Maggie Abbott, to whom Jove had confided the real story behind the Redlands bust.
Jove had not been suborned by the News of the World, but by the FBI in cahoots with MI5, to land the supposedly ‘wicked’ Stones with drug-convictions that would stop them touring America for the foreseeable future.
Despite swearing never to go public with his story, he’d lived in fear that someday an FBI hit-man might seek him out and make sure his mouth stayed shut.
Peter had come through so many horrible medical ordeals yet remained so cheerful and optimistic that I’d come to think of him as indestructible.
The last e-mail I sent him had a list of to-do’s for the Brian Epstein book and when no instant reply came back I assumed it had accidentally gone into Junk.
Then his partner of 40 years the journalist Barbara Metcalfe, phoned me and told me the news.
Most people at the end of a telephone-conversion say ‘Goodbye’, or ‘Bye’ but Peter preferred the somehow friendlier ‘Bye now.’
It’s hard to believe I won’t hear that from him again.
What a lovely tribute to your friend. Deepest condolences.
Genuinely moved by your tribute Philip- may he rest in peace.