No One Captured Beatlemania Like Paul McCartney
We’ve seen lots of Beatlemania photos over the last six decades, from the minute the Fab Four landed at JFK airport in New York City to their pool party in Miami. But we’ve never seen Beatlemania from the inside — until now. The new book Eyes of the Storm, out June 14 (with an accompanying exhibit at London’s National Portrait Gallery), features more than 250 photographs that Paul McCartney took back then, capturing the chaos from the band’s perspective. The rare images range from November 1963 to February 1954, just as the Beatles achieved global superstardom.
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Tell Me What You See
Image Credit: © 1964 Paul McCartney A McCartney mirror selfie taken in London, 1963. A few months earlier, they were still playing Hamburg; by year’s end, they were major stars across the U.K.
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Dizzy Miss Lizzy
Image Credit: © 1964 Paul McCartney Ringo Starr in London in 1964, the year Beatlemania became an unprecedented worldwide phenomenon.
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Can’t Buy Me Love
Image Credit: © 1964 Paul McCartney Lennon in Paris, 1964. On one visit to the city that year, he and McCartney wrote three classic songs — “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “If I Fell,” and “I Should Have Known Better.”
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Run For Your Life
Image Credit: © 1964 Paul McCartney “The crowds chasing us in A Hard Day’s Night were based on moments like this,” McCartney writes of this New York shot. “Taken out of the back of our car on West Fifty-Eighth, crossing the Avenue of the Americas.”
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Some Time in New York City
Image Credit: © 1964 Paul McCartney Photographers capturing the band in Manhattan’s Central Park, 1964.
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I’ll Follow the Sun
Image Credit: © 1964 Paul McCartney Harrison in Miami Beach in February 1964. “That was just like paradise,” McCartney later recalled. “Because we had never been to anywhere where there was palm trees.”
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Boys
Image Credit: © 1964 Paul McCartney Lennon and Harrison in Paris, 1964.
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I’m Looking Through You
Image Credit: © 1964 Paul McCartney McCartney taking selfies in the mirror in Paris, 1964.