Peter Jones (journalist)

Peter Langley Jones (6 January 1930 – 10 July 2015) was a British journalist, author, editor, promoter and presenter who wrote mainly on show business matters, especially pop music, for magazines including Record Mirror and Billboard. He was involved in the early careers of both The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, pseudonymously writing the first book-length biographies of both bands.

He was born in Carshalton, Surrey. After his father died, he moved with his mother and her second husband to Portsmouth, where he started his career as a reporter for the Portsmouth Evening News. He began to specialise in show business interviews, before leaving the newspaper to work as a trainee screenwriter and talent booker for Associated London Scripts, where he worked with such stars as Frankie Howerd, Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes. He left to begin writing a regular column for the Weekend magazine, which in the mid-1950s had a reported circulation of 1.5 million.

As well as writing in a freelance capacity for Weekend, Record Mirror and other magazines, he appeared regularly on Southern TV's sports programmes during the early 1960s. In 1963, after seeing the Rolling Stones perform at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, he recommended them to Andrew Loog Oldham, who became their manager as a result. He actively championed Motown music before it became popular in the UK; John Schroeder, who brokered the first distribution deal for Motown in Britain, said of Jones that he was his only ally in promoting the release of early Motown material.

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