Destined for album
When Tom Murray was asked to go on a mystery photo shoot, little did he know he would end up spending a day with The Beatles. The results are now on display in Harrogate. Yvette Huddleston reportns.
IN the summer of 1968, Tom Murray was a young photographer working for the Sunday Times magazine when one weekend his colleague, the renowned photojournalist Don McCullin, asked if he would accompany him on a photo shoot he was doing around London with “a pop group”. Murray duly went along, little knowing that the day would turn out to be one of the most memorable of his career.
“Don knew that I had done some pictures of pop groups before and he asked me if I could assist him and drive him around, so I went home to pick up my car, then went back to meet him at the Sunday Times office,” says Murray.
“He said ‘bring your camera you might get some good shots’, so I picked up my Nikon F 35mm and two rolls of film. Had we met anywhere else, I couldn’t have collected my camera, so that was a bit of luck.
“Then we pitched up at a rehearsal room in an old church and as we walked down the hall, I could hear someone playing Lady Madonna. We walked in and I saw Paul McCartney sitting at the piano. I think my voice went up a few octaves when I said ‘it’s The Beatles!’”
All of the 23 images taken by Murray that day, which are considered among the best colour photographs ever taken of the band, are currently on display, and available to buy, at the RedHouse Gallery in Harrogate.
“It was as perfect a day as I could wish for,” he says, recalling the events of nearly 56 years ago. “Getting to hang out with one of my favourite bands and take pictures of them was just sensational.”
After meeting at the rehearsal room, the plan was then to drive to various places around London, of the band’s choosing, to take photographs.
At the time they were one of the most famous pop groups in the world but, says Murray, they were able to scoot around London all day from one location to the next without being bothered too much by fans.
“You just wouldn’t be able to do that today because everyone has mobile phones and is on social media, but back then it was fine. We could get a good half an hour or 45 minutes at each place before someone noticed and then we attracted a bit of a crowd.”
The photo shoot was part of a new publicity campaign to support The White Album, which the Beatles were in the process of recording.
“They had hired Don to capture their antics as they wanted and because it wasn’t my assignment, I was left to my own devices to shoot whatever I liked,” says Murray.
“It is a photographer’s dream to be free to shoot what you want: no brief, no instructions and no restrictions.”
It was clearly very liberating and the photographs themselves reflect that sense of freedom, capturing natural, unguarded moments as John, Paul, George and Ringo weren’t posing directly for Murray’s camera.
“It was all very relaxed and off the cuff,” he says. “The boys were play-acting the whole time, and they had ideas bouncing out of them.”
Among the locations they visited that feature in the photographs were Old Street underground station, St Katherine’s Dock, Swain’s Lane, Wapping Pier Head, Paul McCartney’s house in St John’s Wood and the gardens of an old church in St Pancras.
“That last location wasn’t planned,” says
Murray. “The boys had originally wanted to go to Highgate Cemetery to visit Karl Marx’s tomb but when we got there the gate was locked – well, it was a Sunday in London in the 1960s.”
Murray, now aged 80, is currently writing his autobiography – and he has plenty of material to work with in terms of top-quality photographs and interesting anecdotes.
He has photographed many famous people in his time including Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, John Huston, Dustin Hoffman, Princess Margaret, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani.
He has won several awards and accolades for his work and in 1969, at just 25, became the youngest photographer to be commissioned by the Royal Family.
Starting off in local newspapers, he then went to work in Africa in the early 1960s for four years before returning to the UK and securing a position at The Sunday Times. While
‘When I told my girlfriend who I had spent the day with, she wasn’t very happy.’
there, his colleagues included Lord Snowden, Helmut Newton, Eve Arnold and Norman Parkinson. “It was a brilliant place to be and to work alongside all those great photographers,” he says.
Arnold gave him some sound advice about the Beatles snaps he had taken when he got back to the office. “She said to me ‘keep the best for your pension and chuck out the rest’,” he says.
“I processed and printed them, I got rid of the ones I didn’t like and then I put them in a drawer for several years.”
The first time that the photographs were exhibited in public was in 1998 and as the slides had been stored in an envelope in the dark for such a long time, the colour, tone and definition were, and remain, remarkable for their age.
Murray has had an extremely distinguished career and that mad day out over half a century ago certainly was a highlight.
“I am a great believer in right place, right time,” he says. “It was such fun, a wonderful day. I feel very lucky.”
It did get him into a spot of bother with his girlfriend at the time, though.
“I had phoned her beforehand and asked her if she wanted to come with me, but she decided against it and when I told her who I had spent the day with, she wasn’t very happy,” he says, laughing.
“I did explain that I didn’t know until I turned up who we were photographing, but she couldn’t forgive me. She didn’t speak to me for a few weeks afterwards.”
The Beatles: Mad Day Out Photography by Tom Murray is at Red House Gallery, Harrogate until May 25. redhouseoriginals.com