John Lennon & Paul McCartney On The Set Of Television Special The Music Of Lennon & McCartney At Granada

The Quarry Men’s banjo player, Rod Davis, recalls, “I had bought the banjo from my uncle and if he’d sold me his guitar, I might have been a decent enough guitarist to keep McCartney out of the band. I might have learnt guitar chords, I might not, and that was the big limitation really. McCartney could play the guitar like a guitar and we couldn’t, and let’s face it, a banjo doesn’t look good in a rock’n’ roll group. I only met Paul on one other occasion after the Woolton fête and it was at auntie Mimi’s a week or two later. He dropped in to hear us practising. From my point of view, I was the person he was replacing – it’s like Pete Best – you’re the guy who doesn’t know. Some things had gone on that I was unaware of.”

(Best of the Beatles: The sacking of Pete Best by Spencer Leigh, 2015)

January/February?, 1964: John works on the composition of ‘If I Fell’. 

JOHN: So I hope you see that I / Would love to love you / I hope that she won’t cry / When she learns we are two / We’re two / Gonna be the two two of us in love / Two two of us in love…

me when I'm gay and omw to yell at teachers striking during my son's exams

Bull’s-eye view

The camera lens as a ruthless eye – it’s a well-worn cliche, but one that keeps demanding to be used. Photographs, even the most carefully shot, can reveal elements utterly unplanned by the photographer and the subject, from an previously unnoticed tower in a landscape to the lines in the face of a movie star clinging to youth. Since its invention the camera’s capacity to invade privacy has been readily exploited, leading to excitement and anxiety in equal measure.

Another common, but apposite cliche, is the idea that the photographer somehow violates their subject – even if the latter is willing to be photographed – by capturing their raw, unmediated image. As Henri Cartier-Bresson put it: ‘The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.’ Referring to the subject as ‘prey’ sounds slightly terrifying, but is probably a sentiment familiar to many photographers. Even inanimate objects and views become a kind of prey in the avaricious aperture of a camera.

It’s the camera’s invasion of human privacy that is the focus of an exhibition beginning at the end of the month in Tate Modern, entitled Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. Grouped under various themes that range from the obvious (sexually explicit or graphically violent shots) to more subtle examples of voyeurism like government surveillance and street photography, the sample of images available online indicates an exploration of humanity’s secret moments. Some are shocking, like the terrified face of a young South African man clinging to the side of a building while a jeering crowd urges him to jump, some are unsettlingly banal, like the couple kissing at the New York Tortilla Factory, but all share that strange intimacy that comes when a photography ‘steals’ a moment that a subject would never intend to be recorded.

One photograph from the exhibition that captures a thing rather than a person is a powerful image of a British army watchtower at the Crossmaglen security force base in South Armagh. On an otherwise normal-looking street the watchtower looks utterly unnatural, bristling with wire fencing and multiple aerials. Obviously this photo was illicitly taken, and yet the tower looks somewhat ridiculous, rather than threatening. Its incongruity highlights the unnatural political situation that gave rise to its creation.

Ideas of reality and artificiality are thrown into relief in Walker Evans’ 1927 Street Scene (above), where the hatted man viewed from above, bathed in intense shadow, look like figures from the set of a film noir. The fetishisation of the past in film and art often means that genuinely contemporary images end up looking like pastiches.

The value of this exhibition is not just the interesting images that will be on show, but the questions it raises about the function and power of photography, which are even more relevant now than in the past, considering we are under more surveillance now than ever before.

I was wrong, it was harry benson that took the hazy paul photos. multiple photographers horny for beatles

John Lennon backstage at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, England | 4 April 1963 © Dezo Hoffmann

"At first neither John nor I liked this picture because it was contradictory to his tidy image. But his expression and the lighting were so good that we ended up liking it. It seems to sum up John at that time." ~ Dezo Hoffmann

Veep style tv shows about the Beatles that I want

Veep style tv show about Apple in 1968

Veep style tv show about the staff at the Dakota

Good analysis of LJ. I don't remember overt Paul disike but I do remember a lot of Linda dislike. Tho that seems to have been part of a sort of reflexive lack of solidarity between women in the rock scene at the time, encouraged to see each other as threats or something. There's even a weirdly bitchy aside about Joni Mitchell of all people.

The Lost Weekend doco is prob more mature in that way & more positive to Paul+Linda, tho it seems revisionist in that John's violence & periodic dumping of May is played down, & the "paul bringing a message from yoko" forms part of her story by then even tho it's clear from the book that she knew nothing about this at the time. Not dunking on May or saying she's lying - it's just another example of how memories get softened with time, and augmented by stories from others.

Anyway my favourite part of Loving John is John and David Bowie queening out over Elizabeth Taylor, please someone put that in a fic

finished loving john and am turning it around and around in my head. may pang is not without her biases but it's pretty easy to flag where they are and what they're colored by. it is clear to me that she didn't like paul very much, and im not sure whether that's because of the way john presented him to her amidst the business troubles or because she perceived he didn't like her with john. the way may presents the johnandyoko reconciliation, it's entirely caused by yoko's hypnotherapist. but we know that's not entirely true and i dont know if at the time of writing she knew about paul telling john in LA that yoko wanted him back. there's a lot of instances where john and may are conspiring against yoko: keeping secrets and telling lies to pacify her. i dont know if may considered the two of them might have been doing the same to her. it seems easier for her to blame yoko for the whole thing, both the start and end of the relationship, and while she certainly deserves quite a bit of blame it's also john who won't take no for an answer when he first tries to sleep with her and it's john who chose to go back to yoko. yoko knew how to use the deepest parts of his psychology to convince him, but is was still HIS psychology. and honestly as an outside observer even though may had an incredible strength of character at such a young age i dont think anyone was really a match for the depth of trauma john had and it's entirely possible something worse may have happened had he stayed with her longer. and he did almost kill her.

"hey guys, let's all wear dark shirts and not tell paul"

Strumpet City

Set in Dublin during the Lockout of 1913, "Strumpet City" is a panoramic novel of city life. It embraces a wide range of social milieux, from the miseries of the tenements to the cultivated, bourgeois Bradshaws. It introduces a memorable cast of characters: the main protagonist, Fitz, a model of the hard-working, loyal and abused trade unionist; the isolated, well-meaning and ineffectual Fr O'Connor; and the wretched and destitute, Rashers Tierney. In the background hovers the enormous shadow of Jim Larkin, Plunkett's real-life hero. "Strumpet City's" popularity derives from its realism and its naturalistic presentation of traumatic historical events. There are clear heroes and villians. The book is informed by a sense of moral outrage at the treatment of the locked-out trade unionists, the indifference and evasion of the city's clergy and middle class and the squalor and degradation of the tenement slums.