Behind The Beatles: Paul’s photos reveal the early days

In Philip Larkin’s poem Annus Mirabilis, the English poet wrote famously of a significant year for him: “Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me) -/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP ...”

It was also pretty momentous year for the four Scousers who released their first album, Please Please Me, in March of that year. According to Paul McCartney, “We were just four guys having fun and doing what we loved, which was playing music.”

And didn’t they have fun, and didn’t they play a load of music. As Britain left the staid and drab world of the 1950s behind, life was changing, art was changing, music was changing. The Beatles – McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, as if we didn’t know their names - stormed the charts there and around the world, and Beatlemania overwhelmed society.

Now we have Paul McCartney’s perspective on that time thanks to a collection of his contemporaneous photographs, preserved in his archives, but not seen for getting on 60 years.

They came to light only when he was helping put on an exhibition of photos by his wife, Linda Eastman, and he wondered what had happened to them. They capture the months from December 1963, starting in Liverpool, through that year’s Christmas shows at London’s Finsbury Park Astoria, and on to gigs in Paris, and then the first tour to the US, where they played New York, Washington DC and Miami. The photographs are being exhibited at London’s newly renovated National Portrait Gallery.

As McCartney writes in the foreword to 1964: Eyes of the Storm, “no one can doubt that these three months were something of a crucible, but at the time we didn’t know that a new sound, a new movement was happening … [we] couldn’t possibly realise then the implications of what we were doing.”

The bulk of the pictures are candid, taken on the hop, catching his fellow Beatles in relaxed mode, making music, working. They’re mainly in black and white, sometimes with the softest possible focus, and reflective of a very different time.

You can imagine him getting on their nerves, popping up with his Pentax at every possible moment. There are plenty of portraits and snapshots - of their manager Brian Epstein, producer George Martin, their roadie, their publicist; of Lennon in his rarely seen (in those days) glasses, his then-wife Cynthia, Ringo goofing around, George asleep, McCartney’s girlfriend, Jane Asher, other musicians such as fellow Scouser Cilla Black, Billy J. Kramer and Ronnie Spector.