MANY ABBEY RETURNS
It’s the most iconic image of Britain’s biggest band. Exactly 50 years on, the remarkable story behind Scot Iain Macmillan’s famous photograph...
BY today’s standards, Scottish photographer Iain Macmillan arrived for his 10 o’clock job almost criminally unprepared. He brought only one camera – his trusty Hasselblad – a wide angle lens and a stepladder.
No armfuls of tripods, lighting kits or flash stands. He was also running late. All four of his subjects were waiting patiently for him on Abbey Road when he showed up in his van.
Then there was the white Volkswagen Beetle, seemingly abandoned close to the zebra crossing where his shots were to be taken. No one seemed to know who owned it and the police told Macmillan it could not be moved. Well, it would just have to be in the shot then. Macmillan climbed his ladder and, over the next 20 minutes, took only six photographs.
It is now 50 years to the day since the Angus-born photographer’s Friday morning appointment and, looking back, you would have to say the job was a good ’un. One of the six shots of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road on August 8, 1969, is among the most iconic in rock history.
It was chosen as the cover for the album, Abbey Road, which they were recording, and it came to symbolise the Beatles in their late period.
The image established an unremarkable London zebra crossing as one of the world’s most visited rock landmarks. It triggered a slew of imitations which continue to this day – and one of the daftest conspiracy theories of the Sixties. This was the photograph that briefly persuaded millions that Paul McCartney had been dead since 1966.
Certainly the ever modest Macmillan was satisfied with the picture. ‘It’s a very simple, stylised shot,’ he said a few years before his death in 2006. ‘I’m happy with it technically.’
Little about the scene on Abbey Road at 10am half a century ago suggested anything particularly momentous in the offing. Few passers-by even seemed to notice the Beatles clustered on one side of the street as the newly married Linda McCartney took candid shots of the four.
As Macmillan’s van pulled up, it was Paul McCartney who met him and filled him in on the plan. Meanwhile, a policeman summoned by the studio prepared to stop traffic for long enough to allow a few shots to be taken.
ANd so, perched on his stepladder in the middle of the street, the photographer had the Beatles cross Abbey Road one way and then the other in the hope that, in one of the stills, he would find magic. For the final three shots, McCartney removed the sandals he had been wearing – little suspecting the fuss that would later be made over his lack of footwear – but, at the time, that was the least of the photographer’s worries.
It was proving a major challenge to get all four Beatles to walk in step – despite John Lennon’s efforts to keep the bandmates behind him synchronised.
Then there was the background – particularly that VW Beetle. ‘The car just happened to be standing there,’ remembered Macmillan in 1999. ‘It had been left there by someone on holiday – nobody with any connection to the Beatles. A policeman tried to move it away for us but couldn’t.’
The regular appearance of London buses in the middle distance was also causing a problem – as were the trio of tradesmen standing on the left-hand pavement.
Macmillan wanted them out of the shot, but they wouldn’t move – and they can be seen in the
album cover, above the head of Paul McCartney.
decades later, one of them was interviewed by Scottish journalist Ken McNab for his book And In The End, published this year.
Retired painter and decorator derek Seagrove said: ‘I was working in the studios that day. I am the guy on the right. Most people, when they look at the picture, think we are outside somebody’s house, but in fact we were at the other entrance to EMI Studios. I had been there on numerous occasions. On this particular day we saw them all walking out the front door together around about ten or so, which was a bit unusual in itself. You rarely saw them at that time of day. We knew something was going on.
‘Curiosity got the better of us so we followed them. We stopped at the gate and they walked up the other end. We just stood there and watched what they were doing.
‘The guy who was taking the photograph was up on a very tall pair of steps and he was waving to us to get out of the way. But we decided to just stand our ground. He was waving his arms and shouting at us but we refused to budge, being a bit young and a bit bolshie. We had no idea about the significance of the picture.’
Nor, of course, did the photographer, although he did remember thinking he had at least one usable shot out of the six.
He said: ‘I took a couple of shots of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road one way. We let some of the traffic go by and then they walked across the road the other way, and I took a few more shots. The one eventually chosen for the cover was number five of six. It was the only one that had their legs in a perfect V formation, which is what I wanted.’ According to Mr McNab, the idea for doing the photograph on Abbey Road came from Ringo Starr – possibly in reaction to a string of extravagant suggestions from others in the band’s circle. But Macmillan said McCartney dreamed up the zebra crossing shot. He said: ‘The whole idea, I must say, was Paul McCartney’s. A few days before the shoot, he drew a sketch of how he imagined the cover, which we executed almost exactly that day.’
IT was McCartney, too, who ended up as the main talking point of the picture. Just as a crazy conspiracy theory surfaced that he had died in 1966, Abbey Road came out with a cover full of ‘clues’ which supposedly confirmed it.
The shot was portrayed by ‘Paul is dead’ theorists as a funeral scene. Lennon, in a white suit, was deemed to be dressed as a minister, Ringo, in black, as the undertaker and George Harrison, in denims, as the gravedigger. There was also the fact that McCartney is barefoot – a symbol of death in some European cultures.
Then there was that Volkswagen Beetle. The bottom line of its number plate read 28IF – McCartney’s age IF he had lived.
The fact that he was only 27 at the time the album was released did not appear to dissuade the theorists at all from the notion that, through this Iain Macmillan shot, the band were confessing to a monumental cover-up. Macmillan himself was bemused by the furore. He said the Beatles were ‘simply wearing the clothes they came to the studio in that day. I’m constantly amazed by people’s imaginations.’ It was through work done in the mid-60s with Lennon’s second wife Yoko Ono that the photographer came into the Beatles’ orbit.
Born in Carnoustie, he had begun his career with gritty images depicting slum-land in dundee and was later commissioned to do the photography for a publication called The Book of London, which included a picture of Ono and one of her avant-garde exhibits at the Indica Gallery.
After the Abbey Road shoot, Macmillan became Lennon’s photographer of choice for several projects. He also worked with other 1960s icons including The Who’s Pete Townshend, a teenage Stevie Wonder and Twiggy.
By the mid-70s, he had disappeared from the London circuit and was teaching photography at a college in Stoke on Trent.
Only occasionally was he tempted back to celebrity work. In 1993 he returned to Abbey Road to photograph McCartney and his old English sheepdog on the same crossing for a solo album, appropriately called Paul is Live.
Sadly, Macmillan died of lung cancer 13 years later, aged 67.
He was, said Yoko Ono, ‘an incredible photographer’.
And, in his remarkable portfolio, one shot will be gazed at and enjoyed for as long as people enjoy popular music.