The Beatles as you’ve never seen them before

To paraphrase a classic Beatles song, money can’t buy you love. But if you’ve got a spare 20 grand it could buy you a beautifully printed, slightly out of focus black and white photograph of John Lennon taken by Paul McCartney during the onset of Beatlemania.

An intimate exhibition of McCartney’s personal photographs of his fellow Beatles opens at the Gagosian gallery in the West End of London today, offering very limited edition (no more than ten copies each) signed prints of a select few images and blown-up contact sheets. Prices vary from £20,000 to £80,000, so it is not to everyone’s budget. Almost all the pictures have been seen before, in McCartney’s photobook 1964: Eye of the Storm (published by Allen Lane in 2023 and retailing at a more affordable £60). But it is worth a visit to see the lovingly restored images up close and personal, and feel the Beatles staring back at you through history.

There is something strangely moving about being confronted by the young Lennon, aged 23, looking with such frankness, friendliness and smiling intimacy into the camera lens, knowing that he is really looking straight into the eye of his songwriting partner. It is as if we are able to make a connection across a vast span of time into which has been poured all kinds of extraneous information that threatens to cloud the picture, all the pop culture myths, personal opinions, unreliable memories, disputed histories, wild fantasies and critical theories about the relationship between the two human beings on either side of this 35mm camera.

It is a space in which all the perceived rivalries, suspected bitterness and the tragic weight of history dissolves, to allow a kind of unfettered glimpse of the friendship at the heart of the greatest songwriting partnership in musical history. So much has been written about who was the best Beatle, who was the artiest, the most original, creative, kindest, sharpest, funniest and most influential. Who was the leader, who was the follower? Who was the first amongst equals? In McCartney’s photographs, all that fades away to background noise, and the true bond between the human beings at the heart of the enterprise is touchingly apparent.

There is an innocence to these photographs viewed from the perspective of our hyper-connected, info-bombarded, manically sexed up pop era when it can be hard to conceive of a time when pop was ever innocent. The photographs were taken by McCartney in a very short period between December 1963 and February 1964, on the cusp of a new kind of 21st century super fame, snapshots from before the Beatles were transformed into larger-than-life legends.

Here, once again, are John, George, Ringo and Paul himself (posing artfully in a mirror in the small bedroom where he composed Yesterday and so many other classic songs) when they were merely human, another band of young musicians plying their chosen trade, before we all knew (or thought we knew) more than it is probably reasonable to know about anyone other than our nearest and dearest.

A few frames of one of the contact sheets show a cheerful duffer with grey hair and a stripy jacket grinning in amusement at McCartney, who turns out to be Vincent Mulchrone, a Daily Mail journalist credited for coining the phrase Beatlemania in a news headline in October 1963, just weeks before this picture was taken. In the backroom of the exhibition (not on display to the public) there is a snapshot of Lennon, head down, strumming George Harrison’s Gibson Jumbo acoustic guitar, lost in musical reverie. McCartney recalls it being taken right before a telegram arrived from America, informing the Beatles their single I Wanna Hold Your Hand had gone to number one, representing a moment when everything would change, utterly and irrevocably and forever.

Over 60 years later, our fascination for all things Beatles shows little sign of dimming. We may have long since run out of new Beatles music to rave about (indeed, almost everything by the Beatles that is genuinely worth hearing was released during their massively productive eight-year recording career from 1962 to 1970). But, apparently insatiable fan appetites have been fed by a mix of books (over 3,000 titles are listed in one fan bibliography), films, musicals, documentaries, live albums, studio outtakes, remixes, remasters and an approach to branded memorabilia that could make Taylor Swift weak with envy.

Last week, it was announced that the 1990’s retrospective documentary project The Beatles Anthology (a TV series, book and multiple albums of recorded out-takes, released 25 years after the Beatles broke up) has itself been restored, remastered and extended, with a new (ninth) TV episode and (fourth) album coming in November. This news was accompanied by a fresh remix by producer Jeff Lynne of a single, Free as a Bird, which had been recorded by the then-surviving Beatles threesome 15 years after Lennon’s murder, using a lo-fidelity vocal of Lennon singing a snatch of song on a 1977 cassette tape.

It has now apparently been further “de-mixed” and restored with AI sound technology developed by director Peter Jackson for his six-hour Disney TV series Get Back based around footage filmed for the Beatles’ 1970 documentary Let It Be. It is exhausting just thinking about it. We have reached a point where the Beatles’ famous Apple logo should probably be replaced by a serpent consuming its own tail in an act of infinite engorgement, then spitting out the pips and re-eating them too.

Nevertheless, I am as voracious as the next Beatles fan for every new morsel that seems to offer even the slightest hint of a different perspective on the band who, more than any other musicians, shaped the pop culture of our time.

The latest McCartney exhibition is just a small thing, a little piece of an immense and apparently ever-expanding Beatles mosaic. But to stand in front of the pictures, quietly contemplating McCartney contemplating his bandmates on the cusp of all that we know is about to come, does feel profound. I don’t wish to make any claims for McCartney’s standing as a photographer. Some pics are blurry and out of focus, which somehow adds to their vérité authenticity. He certainly has an eye for framing, and for spotting intimate and personal moments that make a picture come alive.

On an accompanying audio track, his daughter, professional photographer Mary McCartney, notes that his photo style shares something with his music making, in that it is very observational, character-driven, with narrative elements, and demonstrates his spontaneity. He told her that he was learning how to operate the 35mm camera as he went along, and she notes admiringly that “he knew to follow the light.” It was a hobby he took up briefly, then set down to focus on making music that we are still listening to with immense joy all these decades down the line. Rumour has it, there is a new McCartney album in the works, whereas I doubt there will be many more photo exhibitions.

For McCartney, these pictures, so beautifully restored, represent personal memories from a particularly magical moment in his life. But the Beatles became so much a part of the story of our times, they seem to be our memories too.

Paul McCartney: Rearview Mirror: Liverpool-London-Paris is at the Gagosian gallery, 17-19 Davies Street, London from August 28 until October 4. The Beatles Anthology book 25^th anniversary edition is published October 14, the Anthology music collections will be released November 21, the Anthology TV series begins streaming on Disney Plus from November 26.