The Electric Pitchfork

John Lennon, Yoko Ono and me: writer Ray Connolly on his incredible friendship with the pair On the anniversary of the former Beatle’s death, his friend Ray Connolly writes exclusively about his surreal adventures with rock’n’roll’s oddest couple Ono and Lennon on November 2, 1980, a month before the former Beatle was shot dead in New York by a crazed fan One afternoon I was sitting with John Lennon in the kitchen at his Tittenhurst Park home in Berkshire when he asked me if I’d written his obituary yet. It was 1970, and amused at the very idea of an obituary when neither of us had reached 30, I replied that I hadn’t. John grinned: “I’d love to read it when you do.” So I promised I’d show it to him if I ever did it. Connolly in 1970, wearing a T-shirt Lennon had designed for friends I’d still not got around to it when, a decade later, on December 9, 1980, I was woken by a phone call at 4.30 in the morning. My first thought was that it must be the taxi comp...

OBITUARY William Sinclair Obituary Old Etonian hedonist and friend of George Osborne, who exuded star quality and went through life with his own set of rules The thrilling thing about William Sinclair and the quality that made life so hard for him as he got older was that he would not hesitate to do what others would never dare. Whether it was standing on a table in a restaurant to declaim Shakespeare, defacing library books, or taking a waitress’s hand as he left a café and persuading her to walk with him for the pleasure of it up a street in Rome, he was always life-enhancing if unpredictable company. He acknowledged no limits and did not abide by the usual rules. In another age he might have been a buccaneer. Tall, tough and strong, in looks, he reminded some of Errol Flynn. Had he possessed more of a literary gift for  telling stories to go with that he could have been another Patrick Leigh Fermor. For he had the charm, intelligence and ability to pass between diff...

ID card betrays Vladimir Putin’s past as Stasi spy in East Germany Vladimir Putin was based in East Germany between 1985 and 1990 For almost 30 years Vladimir Putin’s Stasi identity card lay undiscovered in a Dresden archive. When it was unearthed this week, it ignited new interest in the Russian leader’s career as a KGB officer in East Germany in the 1980s. The document demonstrated the close ties that Mr Putin and his Soviet spymasters in Moscow forged with the ruthless Stasi, the Ministry of State Security. It was also a reminder of how his experience in East Germany, or the GDR, between 1985 to 1990, would sculpt his world view. Mr Putin, 66, has always been coy about his time as a spy abroad. In a book of interviews published in 2000 called  First Person , he said he was a case officer involved in “the usual  intelligence activities”, studying political leaders and parties and trying to glean data about the “main opponent” — Nato. He also describe...

Roger Daltrey exclusive interview: the Who frontman on groupies, the madness of Keith Moon — and backing Brexit As the singer in one of the world’s biggest bands, Roger Daltrey witnessed the wild excesses of the 1960s. Fifty years on, he tells Matt Rudd how marriage, hard graft and fishing kept him sane — and why he’s anti-EU Three years ago, when Roger Daltrey was supposed to be on the second half of the Who’s 50th anniversary stadium tour, he was in hospital phoning friends to say goodbye. “Everything was packing up,” as he puts it, and none of the doctors could work out why. In the half-light and hallucination of a mystery illness, he suddenly remembered Rosa, the industrial-grade physiotherapist who’d travelled with him on US tours in the early 1980s. It was her job to unravel the damage of the nightly three-hour show. “When she found a knot in my back, I’d tense up,” he says. “I’d resist. And she would ask me why I was hanging on. ‘Let it go,’ she’d say. ‘Let it go.’ ” So t...

Sally Field: my life with Burt Reynolds The Oscar-winning actress believes her submissive relationships with men – including Burt Reynolds – began with her abusive stepfather. She talks to Helena de Bertodano Burt Reynolds and Sally Field starred together in Smokey and the Bandit in 1977 When Sally Field won her first Emmy more than 40 years ago – for her performance in Sybil as a woman with multiple personality disorder – she didn’t even go to the ceremony. Burt Reynolds, her lover at the time, was shooting a movie and wanted her by his side. He didn’t stay up to watch the show on television with her. “I ended up sitting alone with the sound turned down so as not to disturb the man who perhaps didn’t know, or maybe didn’t care, how much it meant to me.” As she describes it in her memoir, In Pieces, this was a pattern of submissive behaviour that began in childhood when she was abused by her stepfather. That experience was so destructive that it has overshadowed most of her su...