SOMEWHERE in the back of my mind, I always knew I had taken some pictures in the 1960s.
At first, I couldn’t pinpoint the year, but I was certain we were quite young, just when The Beatles were really taking off.
I never tried to find this collection — consciously, that is — but I kind of thought that it would just surface at the right time.
There’s often a certain amount of serendipity involved.
And while we were preparing for an exhibition of my late wife Linda’s photographs in 2020, I mentioned having taken my own, which, I then learned, had been preserved in my MPL archives.
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So, when I first saw them after so many decades, I was delighted that these images and contact sheets had been lovingly preserved and finally located.
Anyone who rediscovers a personal relic or family treasure is instantly flooded with memories and emotions, which then trigger associations buried in the haze of time.
This was exactly my experience in seeing these photos, all taken over an intense three-month period of travel culminating in February 1964.
It was a wonderful sensation because they plunged me right back.
Here was my own record of our first huge trip, a photographic journal of The Beatles in six cities, beginning in Liverpool and London, followed by Paris (where John and I had been ordinary hitchhikers just over two years before), and then what we regarded as the big time, our first visit as a group to America — New York, Washington and Miami.
To the land where, at least in our minds, music’s future was being born.
Now, 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 were strangely at the centre of this global sensation, which had ignited in 1963 in the UK, with what the press dubbed “Beatlemania”.
It was a period of — what else can you call it? — pandemonium that exploded in British concert halls, on television shows and in the charts, where our music was suddenly what all the kids were listening to.
We four guys from Liverpool couldn’t possibly realise then the implications of what we were doing.
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By the end of February 1964, after our visit to America and three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, we finally had to admit that we would not, as we had originally feared, just fizzle out as many groups do.
We were in the vanguard of something more momentous, a revolution in the culture, especially as it affected the youth.
One of my favourite photos shows George Harrison, his face hidden by sunglasses, being handed a drink — probably a Scotch and Coke — by a girl. And although we don’t see her face, we do see her dazzling yellow swimming costume.
The composition was deliberate, and I’m glad that I didn’t move farther away but kept George as the focus of the image.
In looking back on these photos of the good life, I’m not at all surprised that the colour pictures started happening when we got to Miami, because, suddenly, we were in Wonderland.
Rediscovering the photographs I took in my early twenties inevitably makes me reflect on much larger questions.
I think it’s the same as it would be for anyone, that when you look at pictures of yourself when you were younger — in my case, a lot younger — there are a lot of emotions.
On the most basic level, you think, “Boy, didn’t I look good?” but we all look beautiful when we’re young, and I’m proud to have been through that and to now have the privilege of revisiting so many of those moments.
I realise that many people get sad when they pore through old family albums, but I don’t feel that sense of loss, even though quite a few of the people who are portrayed here have since died.
When people are grieving, I often tell them to concentrate, just concentrate on the great memories.
Yes, it’s sad, and how can I not think of my mother, who went much too early, when I was 14?
Still, the truth is that nobody gets out of this alive.
And as banal as it might sound to some, that is the reality of this thing called life.
I’m aware of how hard it can be, but we shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about death, because it’s inevitable.
It’s not so much a feeling of loss but a joy in the past.
When I look back and think, I have to say “Wow” — we did all that, and we were just kids from Liverpool.
And here it is in the photographs.
Boy, how great does John look? How handsome is George and how cool is Ringo, wearing that funny French hat?
In fact, every picture brings back memories for me, and I can try to place where they were and what we were doing on either side of the picture.
- 1964 Eyes Of the Storm, by Paul McCartney, (Allen Lane) is out now, RRP £60. On show at the National Portrait Gallery, London, June 28-Oct 1.
