UNSEEN BEATLES
John, Paul, George and… Dennis? Mike McCartney’s photographs evoke the dawn of the Fabs, with unexpected intrusions and an encounter over a Ouija board…
JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE… and Dennis? It doesn’t trip off the tongue, but that was the scene immortalised in Kodachrome as a slimmeddown Quarrymen limbered up for a set in the back parlour of 147 Dinas Lane, Huyton, the home of Paul’s Uncle Harry and Auntie Gin, on March 8, 1958.
“It was a wedding reception for cousin Ian and his wife Jackie,” explains Mike McCartney, the picture taker. “Uncle Harry had quite a posh house, a big semi next to a bowls club – he was a joiner. Dennis Littler was cousin Ian’s bezzy mate. I hate it whenever he gets cropped out of the picture. Photography is not about famous people – it’s about life.”
Life teems in Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool, a definitive collection of his photography published next month by Genesis Books. Inside, we encounter The Beatles’ baby steps and plenty besides, much of it unseen. It would still be unseen if his wife hadn’t insisted on a clear-out of Mike’s “crap”. “She said, we have to take some of these old books to Oxfam,” McCartney recalls. “I picked out a blue hardback copy of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, with a stamp from the Liverpool Institute High School For Boys. I threw it in the middle of the room and something popped out. It was a print of our kid. And I remembered: when you’d dried your prints you’d put them in books to flatten them out, otherwise they’d curl.”
CCARTNEY FOUND SHOTS HE NO longer had negatives for, many redolent of life at 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, the two-up-two-down behind the Police Training Academy where James McCartney and sons Paul and Mike strove to make ends meet after the death of midwife mum Mary. There’s a shot of Paul talking to the cleaner Nora, sneakily taken from the boys’ bedroom window (“She really didn’t want me to take a picture of her – thought it was the devil’s work!”) plus photos of the nascent Beatles, at Forthlin Rd, the Cavern Club and elsewhere.
McCartney’s evocative photography reminds the viewer that these were indeed different times. Monumental cityscapes, bomb sites and harbour views project romance atop the reality of late-’50s and early-’60s Liverpool. And there’s a shot of Mike with rock’n’roll hero Gene Vincent at the Cavern, taken by Paul, in which Mike – then an apprentice hairdresser at Andre Bernard – holds a comb under his nose in an imitation of Adolf Hitler. “As you can see,” says Mike drily, “Gene wasn’t that impressed.”
Mike, a hitmaker in his own right with Scaffold, hasn’t always appreciated being considered a Beatle appendage. “I won’t say it’s boring because it was so dynamic,” he says. “But I like to break away.” Yet his lens can’t help but fill in important aspects of the group’s early story: lashings of their inborn character and burgeoning charisma.
“I’m like Rembrandt’s kid brother,” he chuckles. “While he’s painting his masterpieces I’m doing his portrait in crayons.”