Macca got hitched for the third time this weekend, and as tidy as he looked in his best bib and tucker, his wedding photos can't hold a candle to the brilliance of the Abbey Road sessions.
I ve often wondered how you get to be immortalised on the cover of a classic album, without being in the band. Paul Cole did it. He was an American tourist who happened to be on vacation in London. On 8 August 1969, as he walked around the streets of St John s Wood waiting for his wife, he stumbled across four guys being photographed on a zebra crossing. He watched for a while as they went there and back again. And again. And one more time. And that was it. Without knowing it at the time, that s how he came to be captured for posterity on one of the most famous photographs of all time the cover of the Beatles Abbey Road LP, standing to the left of John Lennon s head on the album sleeve. But, as a new exhibition reveals, he might so easily not have been on the cover. Beatles and Bystanders: the Abbey Road sessions on show at Snap Galleries Piccadilly space in central London, uncovers, for the rst time, at least a dozen other characters who might equally have featured on the cover of one of the most important albums in the history of popular music, if a different frame had been chosen for the album sleeve.
Scottish photographer Iain MacMillan (1938-2006) was the man behind the camera. He took just six photographs that day, and the fth frame in the sequence was selected for the front cover. It s the one everyone knows. crossing from left to right. Paul McCartney barefoot with a cigarette in his hand. John and Ringo (like Paul) in Tommy Nutter suits, with George Harrison at the back, dressed in denim. The other Paul, Paul Cole, stands on the right pavement, while on the left of the photograph is the fth Beatle. Well, Beetle. The Volkswagen Beetle, registration LMW 281F, achieved cult status after appearing on the album and after selling at auction, was displayed at the Volkswagen Museum in Germany.
Abbey Road is one of the most recognisable covers in the history of popular music certainly one of the most aped.
Out of the shadows..
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