Ray Coleman

As a writer for Melody Maker, Ray Coleman was a widely read music journalist in Britain at the time the "beat boom," or the British Invasion as it's known in the U.S., took off in 1963. He was one of the first writers to give national coverage to the Beatles, who appreciated him as one of the relatively few reporters at the time who would discuss their music as well as their celebrity. Coleman got to travel with the Beatles often during Beatlemania, and wrote about them throughout the '60s. It was to Coleman (then editor of Disc), in fact, that John Lennon revealed in early 19...