Books

Macca the snapper

JOSEPH CONNOLLY

1964: Eyes of the Storm: Photographs and Re ections

By Paul McCartney

Allen Lane £60

I could review this book in just one word: Fab.

But I suspect the editor requires rather more. So let’s take a look at this thing.

What we have here is Paul’s selection of 275 photographs (from nearly 1,000), nearly all taken by him between October 1963 and March 1964, and newly unearthed as contact sheets and negatives – he had never developed a single roll.

The period is pivotal, covering the emergence and then absolute explosion of Beatlemania. It is highly fitting that the great majority of the images are in black-and-white. Back in those days, that was how we all came to see and know (and love) the Fab Four.

Newspapers were black-and-white and so was television – as were the very memorable early publicity shots by Dezo Hoffmann, as well as Robert Freeman’s brilliant and moody image for the cover of their second LP, With the Beatles

We really came to know that they actually had complexions, and that their hair colours varied, only from magazines such as Fabulous and Rave, both of which made their debuts in early 1964.

Even that first great film, A Hard Day’s Night, was shot in black-andwhite. A lot of the mayhem of fandom, echoed in the film, is very ably and excitingly captured in this book by an actual Beatle, who was very much one of the eyes of the storm.

The earliest pictures here were taken in Liverpool, before things went completely crazy. Many are quite a revelation – and testimony to Paul’s innate ability to light and frame a picture.

Amid the everyday snaps are some notable portraits of his fellow Beatles, maybe influenced by the photographer Astrid Kirchher, the girlfriend of the ‘fifth Beatle’, Stuart Sutcliffe, whom they met in the very early days in Hamburg (and who gave them the Beatle haircut).

There is here the best picture I have ever seen of Brian Epstein (not looking anxious as he nearly always did) and a beautiful portrait of Paul’s girlfriend Jane Asher.

Paul’s preface constantly alludes to his sheer amazement at being in this quite extraordinary situation: a very young man caught up in the whirlwind. As he says, ‘We were strangely at the centre of a global sensation.’

That the National Portrait Gallery has just reopened, after a long refurbishment, with an exhibition of these pictures he finds ‘humbling, but also astonishing’. As indeed it is.

What comes across most vividly in this book is the sheer helter-skelter thrill of it all – being a Beatle with his three best chums, having the time of their lives, as they simply gasped in wonder.

From Liverpool, the book moves to London, and the opening of the first Beatles Christmas Show at the Finsbury Park Astoria. In this section, there are some great backstage shots and pictures of John Lennon in glasses (he never appeared with them in public) – not in the weird little round ones he became famous for, but the full Hank Marvin.

In Paris, the pictures become a little more self-consciously arty. But in New York, the full frenzy of fandom is brilliantly caught: the masses of people chasing after them; mounted and armed policemen trying to maintain control.

Amid it all, Paul says, ‘We messed around. It kept us sane … but who can ever be prepared for fans ripping at your clothes or taking scissors to your hair?’

He also captures New York street life with its brash billboards – while in Washington he snaps an ‘art’ cinema with this in lights: ‘Christine Keeler Goes Nudist. Plus Playgirls’.

Then comes a rather Wizard of Oz moment in Miami, when Paul switches to Kodachrome, the better to capture the sunshine, palm trees and turquoise swimming pools.

‘We all look beautiful when we’re young,’ Paul says – though we see from when he passed his Pentax to someone else that he always managed to be the most beautiful of the lot.

At the age of 81, Sir Paul McCartney CH MBE is well aware of his towering status and vast achievements as a musical genius. But clearly he has never forgotten the sheer sensation of being young in those early innocent days, when he, John, George and Ringo never even dreamed that they would be a force for ever.

A reporter whom he photographed on an American train asked him, ‘What place do you think this story of the Beatles is going to have in the history of western culture?’

Paul replied, ‘You must be kidding.’

Fab. Just fab.

Joseph Connolly is a novelist, a former bookshop-owner and a huge Beatles fan

All photos 1964