No One Captured Beatlemania Like Paul McCartney
We’ve seen lots of Beatlemania photos over the last six decades, from the minute the Fab Four landed at JFK airport in New York City to their pool party in Miami. But we’ve never seen Beatlemania from the inside — until now. The new book Eyes of the Storm, out June 14 (with an accompanying exhibit at London’s National Portrait Gallery), features more than 250 photographs that Paul McCartney took back then, capturing the chaos from the band’s perspective. The rare images range from November 1963 to February 1954, just as the Beatles achieved global superstardom.
“Looking at these photos now, decades after they were taken, I find there’s a sort of innocence about them,” McCartney writes. “Everything was new to us at this point. But I like to think I wouldn’t take them any differently today. They now bring back so many stories, a flood of special memories, which is one of the many reasons I love them all, and know that they will always fire my imagination. The fact that these photographs have been taken by the National Portrait Gallery is humbling yet also astonishing — I’m looking forward to seeing them on the walls, 60 years on.”
Source: Angie Martoccio/rollingstone.com
