Paul McCartney's photographs lift the lid on a year in the life of a Beatle back in '64

The former Beatle recently took part in a Q&A with Mary McCartney about his book, 1964: Eyes of the Storm, and his exhibition of the same name is now showing at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It shares, for the first time, the photographs taken by Paul, using his own camera, between December 1963 and February 1964 - a time when The Beatles were catapulted from a British sensation to a global phenomenon.

The photographs are McCartney's personal record of this explosive time, when he was, as he puts it, in the 'Eyes of the Storm'.

1964: Eyes of the Storm presents 275 of McCartney's photographs from the six cities of these intense, legendary months - Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C. and Miami - and many never-before-seen portraits of John, George and Ringo.

In his foreword and Introductions to these city portfolios, McCartney remembers "what else can you call it - pandemonium" and conveys his impressions of Britain and America in 1964 - the moment when the culture changed and the Sixties really began.

Your new book is titled Eyes Of The Storm. Can you explain how you came up with that name?

I thought of Eye Of The Storm, singular, because The Beatles were in the eye of their own self-made storm, but as we looked at the pictures, I thought it's more 'eyes' of the storm, because there wasn't just one moment; there were plenty of moments when we were at the centre of a storm. And also, there were lots of eyes in the pictures of people you were taking. It was a crazy storm, a crazy whirlwind, that we were living through in touring and in working pretty much every day and seeing loads of people wanting to photograph us.

What was the family influence of photography on you?

I've always been interested in images from the very first days when our family had a little box camera. I used to love the whole process of loading a little roll of Kodak film into this Brownie camera. Then, as time went on, I really learnt to appreciate good photography. Eventually, The Beatles each had a camera, so we could actually take pictures ourselves, and we all really got into it. You'd look for good lighting or an interesting situation, and the interesting situation was basically Beatle tours. You would be seeing stuff out of an aeroplane window, or out of a car window, and everywhere you went you just took pictures - some of which were basically just tourist pictures, but some of which you had an opportunity to get a little bit deeper. You were spending a bit of time with the other Beatles, so you were able to take some nice portraits of them. We were just having fun with these things, and capturing moments you knew nobody else could capture, so that was very exciting.

When the Beatles phenomenon exploded, it was an assault that swept through global mass culture like nothing else before it.

Yeah. The nice thing was that that's what we wanted. It wasn't as if it was thrust on us and we were unwilling. We had been a little band in Liverpool and we'd always had the ambition to be a big band, and to be able to even move beyond Liverpool to London, to Hamburg, to New York, and to then be known worldwide... We wanted fame. We wanted the thrill of the fame and the things it would bring with it.

From the beginning, The Beatles were as much about how you looked as well as your music. Were you aware that you were becoming a visual icon?

Yeah. We'd been interested in the visual aspect of everything we'd done since we began. We thought we should all get matching jackets, that we should all look like the same, and we saw the haircut from our friend from Hamburg and we said, 'Could you cut it like that?' And that started the Beatle haircut. We'd always been interested in these visuals; John was from art school, I was very interested in art at school, and that was very much part of who we were.

It was when you were in Paris that you found out I Want To Hold Your Hand had reached No.1 in America. Do you remember hearing that news?

Yeah. I'd said to Brian Epstein and the guys generally that I don't think we should go to America until we've got a Number One hit, and it was just a policy thing that I thought would be a great idea because I knew we'd be coming in on a wave of success. So we waited, and we happened to be in the George V Hotel in Paris and the telegram arrived from Capital Records in America. 'Attention: The Beatles. Congratulations boys, Number One in the US, I Want To Hold Your Hand.' Ahh! We just screamed and jumped on each other and ran around the hotel room and danced.

Before you got there, what did America represent to all of you?

America was the big prize. It was where most of the music, if not all of the music, that we loved came from. It was the home of the movies that we loved to watch. The blues came from America. So many great things that we loved were American, and to us it was the land of the free.

The cover image of the book is one you took while being driven on West 58th Street, heading west in New York from the Plaza Hotel with the press following you. How do you think it reflects the theme of this body of work in the book?

I think it's a lucky image because it's powerful. It says more than one thing. It says New York, skyscrapers. It says people running, trying to catch up with our car. Us escaping. Us trying to outrun them. It's very typical of the kind of thing that happened to us during that period. There are all sorts of other pictures in the book that portray that period, but this one I just thought says a lot. It's that pursuit that is really what put The Beatles in the middle of this storm. All these people running, they are the eyes of the storm.

Was it claustrophobic for you to be in the middle of that?

You would think it would be terrible. You'd think it'd be claustrophobic and painful, but I didn't. I can only speak for me. This was something we wanted, so when it happened, when there were crowds outside the Plaza Hotel and the mounted policemen were holding them back, this was like being in a very exciting film. We were the stars at the centre of this thing. And the good thing was that there was never any malice. People may be running after us, but they just wanted to see us. They just wanted to say hi. They just wanted to touch us. It never felt dangerous to me. It felt that these were fans - particularly the young girls who were going mad - and it was because of our music. That was a validation of everything we were doing, so it felt good.

Had you gone to Washington specifically because it was the capital? Why was the Coliseum picked to play?

I don't know why it was. We never bothered with any of that, we were just shunted round to places. But that didn't matter, just as long as there was a gig to go to. It never mattered until we hit segregation in the south and then that mattered. We refused to play it because we'd never heard of segregation. We couldn't believe it when they said, 'All the black people will be sitting over there, and all the white people will be sitting over there.' We said no, and I'm very proud of the fact that we refused to play it. Of course the money factor for them kicked in, but we didn't give a shit - it wasn't more important than the moral aspect. They said, 'Right, okay, we'll integrate,' and that was what they did and that was great, it was a beautiful moment.

There are two distinct yet contrasting themes that run through your photographs: one is the playfulness of innocence as you experience America for the first time, and the other is a hint of violence, evident in the pictures of policemen and guns. Why did the latter appeal to you?

You don't see many guns in England. We're not a land of guns. Growing up, I don't think I ever saw a gun. I certainly never handled one. So to come to America, particularly in the wake of President Kennedy's killing, America was the land where people had guns. It still saddens me to this day that America's history required them in the early days to have firearms to protect themselves against people like the British, and once the law was put in place, the Second Amendment, it stayed in place and was never adjusted.

Something else that is apparent in both these pictures and your music is your attachment to the common man or woman. We see it in your pictures of cops, railway workers, photographers, and airport mechanics. Where does your love for the common man come from?

That's my people. That's where I'm from. I grew up in a working class family in Liverpool. Those are the people I met. Those are the people I knew. I didn't grow up detached from those people at all; I was right in the middle of them. My relatives would be those kind of working class people, the people I would know: the bus driver, the postman, the milkman. That was who I hung out with. That's who I associated with. I have a lot in common with ordinary people.

Did breaking America make you feel that The Beatles' success was turning into something real, that it wasn't just a flash in the pan?

Yeah, it was a huge step, and we knew it would be. We were very gratified to be the band that broke open the doors for the British Invasion. It felt very good. When we got back to England, it gave us a huge amount of confidence to go anywhere in the world.

The historian Jill Lepore said that in many ways The Beatles helped change history in that intense period of 1964. Would you agree, and did you recognise it at the time?

Yeah. It was a year in which a lot of things changed. For us it did because our fame crystallised and it became a very important time for us. But I think for the world too: colour television was coming in, the world was recovering from the shock of a president being killed, and our generation, which later became known as the baby boomers, we were now experiencing thrills and freedom and luxury that our parents hadn't experienced. By the middle of the 1960s, we had so many things that our parents didn't: travel, sexual liberation, money... It was exciting to be part of that change.

There is a general sense of innocence to all of these photos, because it was the first time you'd experienced anything like this. Do you think you would take them differently now?

I like to think I wouldn't take them any differently. Looking at the photos, some of them were soft and I could say, 'Well, I wish I'd taken a bit more time to focus them up,' but you didn't have that time, and I'm quite glad now. We were moving at a speed that you just had to grab, grab, grab, so it meant some of them were not as sharp as others, but I kind of like them. I was very pleased to see them after all those years and look back on them as a historical record and a cultural record, because they're recording that period of time from an angle that nobody else had, from inside The Beatles. It's a pretty unique and privileged angle to be taking them from.

IN THE NEWS