Paul McCartney thought he’d “lost” the photographs in his new book
Paul McCartney has revealed the photographs in his new book 1964: Eyes of the Storm were “lost” for many decades.
In addition to the photographs appearing in a new book, from June 28th to October 1st, 2023, the National Portrait Gallery will display 250 unseen photographs taken by McCartney of his bandmates and the cities they travelled to during their 1963-64 tour.
The images were taken on Paul’s personal Pentax camera and will also be available in an accompanying photobook titled 1964: Eyes of the Storm, slated for release on June 13th via Penguin.
Speaking about the photographs with BBC Radio 4’s The Today Show programme, McCartney explained how he re-discovered the images. He said: “It was really good actually because I thought I’d lost them. I’d assumed because the ’60s was so loose. Doors were left open, and I’d invite everybody in”.
He added: “A lot of stuff went missing, so I thought this would all be missing but my photo archivist, who mainly deals with Linda’s work, she said, ‘No, we’ve got them all.’ So I said, ‘Wow, let’s get them out, let’s get a look at them’. So I was very pleasantly surprised.”
In the same interview, McCartney revealed The Beatles plan to release their “last” song later this year, which was enhanced by artificial intelligence. “We were able to use that kind of thing when Peter Jackson did the film Get Back, it was us making the Let It Be album. He was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano”.
McCartney concluded: “He could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s a voice, this is the guitar, lose the guitar.’ And he did that, so it has great uses. So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on, and we’ve just finished it up. It’ll be released this year. We were able to get John’s voice and make it pure through AI, and then we could mix the record as you would normally do”.
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