Paul McCartney explains how he mourns John Lennon and George Harrison: “I’d prefer them to be here”
Former Beatles member Sir Paul McCartney has unearthed never seen before photographs of the Liverpool band at the height of their fame.
Taken by McCartney himself, the pictures were captured across a three-month period in global cities such as New York and Paris and are due to be exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery from the end of this month. An accompanying book, 1964: Eyes of the Storm, goes on sale today.
In an interview with Martha Kearney of BBC Radio 4’s Today at the exhibition, McCartney discussed how he felt about rediscovering the photographs after such a long time. At one point in the chat, the host asked McCartney if there’s a “poignancy” for him looking at the pictures of the young men, George Harrison, John Lennon and Brian Epstein, as they are no longer with us.
The musician replied: “It is very poignant, yeah. It’s great because, you know, whenever you lose someone I think the natural thing is ‘Well we’ve got beautiful memories’, and you hold fast to those memories of the good times, I don’t tend to dwell on the fact that you’ve lost someone.”
He continued: “After a while – it will maybe take a year or two – but then you can look back, and so yeah, I’m looking at George there and it makes me think, ‘God, I met him on the school bus and he’s my little mate, my little brother’, you know? Similarly with John. You just remember where you met them, things you did.”
McCartney concluded: “We went hitchhiking together, me and George went down to Wales once, and then another time we went down to Exmouth, we just hitchhiked, so we were really close, you know? Then when it came to The Beatles, and you’d have this sort of overwhelming stuff happening to you, you knew each other so well that you could lean on each other, so yeah, that’s what I see in these pictures. But yeah, it is sad, because I’d prefer them to be here.”
Listen to The Beatles ‘Help!’ below.
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