The journalist and TV producer Peter Trollope, who has died aged 72, did the background research for six music biographies I wrote –John Lennon (2008), Mick Jagger (2012), Paul McCartney (2015), Eric Clapton (2018), Jimi Hendrix (2020) and George Harrison (2023) – and performed brilliantly every time. In recent years he had numerous major health problems, but continued working tirelessly – indeed, had been itching to get started on our next project, a biography of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein.
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 his bone-dry wit.
Born in Leicester, Peter grew up on the Cheshire Wirral – the son of Tony, a sales executive, and Beryl – and by the age of 14 had decided he could only be a reporter. After graduating from journalism college in Preston, he joined Merseyside’s evening paper, the Liverpool Echo, becoming successively its news editor, crime reporter and chief feature writer and winning several national and regional awards for his work.
His finest hour there came in the 1980s, 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.
Switching to television in 1990, he exchanged reporting for producing hard news programmes such as Granada’s World in Action and Inside Out. World in Action’s largest-ever audience, 10.3 million, watched his 1993 documentary about his fellow broadcaster Lynn Faulds Wood’s fight against bowel cancer.
To list all Peter’s investigative triumphs for my books would need a book of its own so I’ll mention just one. In 1967, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones 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 vanished immediately after the raid and never resurfaced subsequently.
Peter traced him to Los Angeles, where he had 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. He 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. And despite swearing never to go public with his story, he had lived in fear that someday an FBI hit-man might seek him out and make sure his mouth stayed shut.
Peter is survived by his partner of 40 years, the journalist Barbara Metcalfe, and their two daughters, Thea and Isabella.
Most people at the end of a telephone conversation 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.
