Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

As a Beatles fan, I would be quite happy to display all their album covers on my wall, if decorating my humble abode with LP sleeves was my thing (the putative notion of such interior design innovation, of course, being the premise for this series). I imagine the Beatles would appreciate the pun in my song selection: Beatles songs sung by others…

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The cover photo of Beatles For Sale is probably my favourite of all Fab Four pics. The lads look as tired (because they were exhausted) as half of the hurriedly compiled album sounds. The photo evokes late autumn, mainly because it was taken at that time of the year during a session in London”s Hyde Park (the LP was released on 4 December 1964). The photographer was Robert Freeman, who shot the photos for four other Beatles album covers: Please, Please Me, With The Beatles, Help! and Rubber Soul.

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Almost exactly a year later, on 3 December 1965, the Beatles released another LP, Rubber Soul, with cover art that evoked autumn. I’ve always imagined that on the photo the four were looking down into a well. What actually happened was that photographer Freeman was projecting a series of photos he had taken at Lennon’s place on an LP sleeve-sized cardboard, to give an idea as to how each option would look as a cover. At one point, the cardboard had slipped, and the image was projected at an angle. According to Paul, the Beatles really liked the effect, and asked Freeman whether he could recreate it. As we know, he could. The title Rubber Soul was a pun of a criticism McCartney had heard from an American musician of Mick Jagger, whose singing was described as “plastic soul”. The Rolling Stones almost inspired a much worse pun when the Beatles considered naming their next album, which we know as Revolver, “After Geography”, as pun on the Stones” LP Aftermath. Happily, sanity prevailed.

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Much as we may take it for granted on account of its ubiquity, I like the Abbey Road cover a lot for its simplicity. It is a great snapshot in time: the particular movement, the way the cars are parked (especially the VW Beetle with its supposedly cryptic license plate), the transience of Paul’s cigarette. I enjoy looking at the photo, imagining the scene at that precise moment. Seconds previously, a car had gone over the zebra crossing — we see the back of it as our four friends parade in single file. The distance of the car to the zebra crossing would suggest that John began leading the guys across the road the moment the car had passed, doing so fairly briskly (George clearly is striding hard to keep up). And in the background, there is a group of people and a single individual (one Paul Cole, a tourist speaking to a policeman in a black van) witnessing the scene with some interest. They surely had no idea that they would feature on the cover of what may be the greatest album of the 1960s, nor probably did the owner of the legs and blue dress we see flying by on the back cover.

The photo was taken on 8 August 1969 at 11:35 by Iain MacMillan, a friend of John and Yoko’s, who stood on a step ladder as he shot the Beatles walking over the zebra crossing twice in both directions. Reportedly a police man stopped the traffic for a short while to let the shoot, all of six photos, go ahead (clearly he stopped the traffic only in the left lane; the sequence shows that as the four cross the road again, they have let a black cab pass as a doubledecker bus approaches). One of the photos, taken before the Fab Four cross the road, shows an old lady approaching the Beatles as Paul fixes Ringo’s collar.

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If I had to pick just one Beatles cover to decorate my wall, it would be that of With The Beatles, the group’s second LP. The photo was taken on 22 August 1963 in a corridor in the Bournemouth Palace Court Hotel, not an establishment generally associated with great moments in rock ‘n’ roll. Photographer Freeman was given instruction to recreate the shadow-and-light effect often employed by their Hamburg-days friend Astrid Kirchherr, the girl in whose arms original Beatle Stu Sutcliffe died (see here for Kirchherr’s pictures). Freeman achieved the effect by using natural light coming through a window at the end of the corridor.

Kirchherr never shot a Beatles cover, but her sidekicks Klaus Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer were involved in cover art. Voormann designed the Revolver cover; Vollmer’s photo of Hamburg-days Lennon appeared on the cover of John’s 1975 Rock ‘n’ Roll album.

Now seems also a good time to dismiss the story that Astrid Kirchherr “invented” the Beatles mop top style (known in German as Pilzkopf, or “mushroom head”). It was already a hairstyle popular among the art student set (the “Exis”, or existentialists) and sported by Vollmer, whose example the Beatles would follow.

Musically, With The Beatles shows only hints of the impact the group would have on music. Almost half of it comprised cover versions. It was a remarkable album for what it did not include: a single. At a time when releasing LPs as a clutch of singles plus loads of fillers was the norm, the Beatles took a conscious decision not to include their most recent hits, such as She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand, on the album. The gamble plaid off: the album was a massive hit in an age when pop LPs didn’t sell well. So it can be said that the success of With The Beatles helped raise the status of the humble LP. Within four years, the Beatles would release the benchmark LP of the 1960s, Sgt Pepper”s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

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More great covers