A Mad Day Out: Don McCullin's Secret Beatles Photoshoot in 1968
- Jul 29, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 28
Five months before he spent a day photographing the Beatles goofing around London, Don McCullin was crawling through the rubble of Hue during the Tet Offensive, one of the bloodiest stretches of the Vietnam War. He'd just turned 32, he'd already covered wars in Congo, Cyprus and Israel, and he genuinely thought the call from Apple was a wind-up.
“An unfamiliar voice said he was phoning from Apple and wondered if I would consider spending a day photographing the Beatles for a fee of two hundred pounds,” McCullin later wrote in the introduction to his book A Day In The Life Of The Beatles. “They were a little tired of approaches from photographers and wanted to get a fresh supply of pictures. They would return the negatives
and I would keep the copyright.”
The date was 28 July 1968, right in the middle of recording The White Album, a session so fraught that McCullin's breezy, sunlit photos of the band larking about London barely hint at what was actually going on inside Abbey Road that summer.
A War Photographer's Day Off
McCullin's presence on the shoot is what makes it stand out from every other Beatles photo session. By 1968 he was widely regarded as the best war photographer working, and his images from Hue that February, including the now-famous shot of a shell-shocked American Marine gripping his rifle and staring into nothing, are still held up as some of the defining photographs of the entire Vietnam War. He'd go on to be knighted for that body of work in 2016, and as recently as this July, a new retrospective of his Vietnam images was published by GOST Books, built from his own contact sheets, notes and even his old boot and helmet.
Going from the Citadel at Hue to a garden in St John's Wood in the space of five months is a jump most people can't get their head around, and by his own account, McCullin couldn't either. He wasn't used to working this way at all.
“I'm a battlefield photographer,” he said. “I knew how to deal with certain kinds of photographic calamities, but not on this scale. I was slightly in awe and out of my depth. I wasn't accustomed to the speed of their world. I was used to running street battles and this was something different… The day was a hit-and-run accident. They just threw themselves into situations. They completely opened themselves. They gave me every opportunity, and then they took over.”
From His Own Gang to the Beatles
McCullin's career had actually started with a strikingly similar kind of photo. In 1958, as a 23-year-old with a Rolleicord camera bought during his national service, he took a single frame of a local Finsbury Park gang called the Guvnors, all dressed up in their Sunday suits and larking about in a bombed-out house near his home, purely for a laugh. The picture only became valuable because one of the gang was later tied to the stabbing of a policeman. The Observer bought it, and that one negative launched his entire career.
A decade later he was regarded as good enough at photographing atrocity that Henri Cartier-Bresson reportedly told him, “I have one word to say to you: Goya,” comparing him to the Spanish painter best known for his unflinching depictions of war. By 2019, a print of McCullin's Shell-Shocked Marine from Hue sold at Phillips London for just under $32,000, making it his auction record. His work got its first dedicated New York exhibition, at Hauser & Wirth, only last autumn.
So in a strange way, the Beatles shoot bookends the two ends of McCullin's career: a group of ordinary young men from his own street messing about for a camera in 1958, and four of the most famous young men on earth doing much the same thing exactly ten years later.
Six Photographers, One Very Long Day
McCullin wasn't actually working alone. Paul McCartney had brought him in first, but the band ended up with six photographers trailing them that day: McCullin, Mal Evans (their long-serving road manager), Ronald Fitzgibbon, Stephen Goldblatt, Tony Bramwell and Tom Murray. Rounding out the entourage were Yoko Ono, McCartney's girlfriend at the time Francie Schwartz, and Mal Evans' six-year-old son Gary, who ended up in several of the day's best-known shots.
Tom Murray's involvement is one of the stranger footnotes. He was 25 at the time, an apprentice to Lord Snowdon and, by some accounts, the youngest photographer ever commissioned by the Royal Family. McCullin invited him along without saying who the job was actually for, so Murray drove up from Suffolk with a couple of rolls of colour film he'd grabbed on a whim, despite normally shooting in black and white. He only worked out who he'd be photographing when he arrived at the location and heard someone playing “Lady Madonna” on a piano, then turned round to find Paul McCartney at the keys.
Murray took two rolls that day, and just 23 frames survive. He sat on them for decades before finally releasing signed prints in a limited run of 195, after Christie's valued his surviving colour slides at around $100,000 each, more than £1.1 million in total. Fifty years after the shoot, in 2018, he also published his own book of photos from the day to mark the anniversary.
Thomson House and the Wind Machine
The day started at Thomson House on Gray's Inn Road, home of The Times, where Lord Snowdon had set up a photography studio. McCullin shot the band against a blue backdrop using Ektachrome colour film, and one of the frames from that session ended up on the cover of Life magazine on 13 September 1968, the whole reason Apple had called him in the first place.
He later admitted the studio setup wasn't really his territory. He turned on a wind machine to get some movement into the shots, and Ringo, dressed head to toe in a chrome yellow shirt against a blue backdrop, apparently made the whole thing worth it. Thomson House itself didn't survive much longer than the photos taken inside it. It was demolished the following year.
A Parrot in the East End
From there the group moved to the Mercury Theatre, a community hall in Notting Hill, for a far scrappier session. Someone produced a live parrot, there was an old upright piano the band started messing around on, and the lighting was so bad that very few usable photos came out of the location at all. It's one of the least documented stops of the whole day, mostly because there simply wasn't much to show for it.
A quick stop at Highgate Cemetery followed, though the band didn't linger. Then it was on to Old Street, where they climbed onto a traffic island in one of the busiest junctions in London and posed on a large concrete block in full view of passing traffic, somehow without causing a scene.
Hollyhocks, a Fountain and a Sleeping Stranger
The most photographed stop of the day was St Pancras Old Church and Gardens, where several of the shoot's best-known images came from. The band posed by a circular flower bed spelling out “1869 to 1968 NDFS”, sat on a bench with young Gary Evans wedged between Lennon and Starr while McCartney and Harrison stood behind them, and spat water at the camera lenses from a nearby drinking fountain. A little further along they were shot half-hidden in a bed of tall hollyhocks, a photo that would later end up as the gatefold sleeve for the 1973 Red and Blue compilation albums.
One of the stranger details from St Pancras never made it into any caption at the time. The Beatles were photographed next to a man asleep on a park bench nearby, seemingly unbothered by four of the most famous people on the planet a few feet away. The photos give no indication he ever woke up.
Playing Dead at Wapping Pier
The single strangest image from the whole day came at Wapping Pier, where John Lennon suddenly dropped to the ground and lay still while the other three crouched over him, watching. It's a playful shot on the surface, four friends messing about by the Thames, but knowing what would happen to Lennon twelve years later, it's hard to look at without a slight chill.
The final stop was Paul McCartney's own house at 7 Cavendish Avenue in St John's Wood, where the band posed inside a glass dome he'd had built in his garden, a strange, almost futuristic bookend to a day that had started in a formal newspaper studio and wound its way through a cemetery, a parrot-filled hall and a busy roundabout.
The Tension Underneath the Smiles
None of the joking around in McCullin's photographs gives away what was actually happening at Abbey Road that summer. The White Album sessions were some of the most difficult of the band's career. For the first time, outsiders were allowed into the studio in the form of Yoko Ono and Francie Schwartz, and the four of them increasingly worked apart from each other rather than together. Less than a month after the Mad Day Out, on 22 August 1968, Ringo Starr walked out of the sessions entirely, convinced the others didn't need him. He was talked back into the band two weeks later, but the White Album cover, when it finally arrived, was a stark, blank white sleeve, about as far as you could get from the technicolour chaos McCullin had captured that July.
The tension didn't come out of nowhere either. Around this same period, Lennon was firing off scathing letters to McCartney over the direction of the band and Apple's finances, the kind of falling-out documented in one particularly vicious letter Lennon sent Paul and Linda McCartney in 1971, once the split had properly set in.
A little over a year after the Mad Day Out, the band had effectively stopped existing as a working unit. The bruising experience of recording Let It Be and the ongoing mess at Apple Corps finished the job that had already started in the summer of 1968.
The Photos Finally Surface
For decades, most of McCullin's Beatles pictures sat unpublished. Aside from the Life cover and a couple of frames used in his own book In England, almost none of the material saw daylight until Jonathan Cape and Rizzoli published A Day In The Life Of The Beatles in October 2010, more than 40 years after the shoot, collecting around 100 of his images and edited by Mark Holborn.
Stephen Goldblatt's version of the day, shot on the same afternoon from a different angle, took even longer to reach the public. His photos were published in a limited run of just 250 copies by the non-profit Fotovision around 2010, put together with the help of Beatles historian Norman Maslov, and copies now rank among the hardest Beatles photo books to track down. A signed, slipcased edition became rarer still after McCullin needed emergency surgery partway through the signing process, meaning very few of that edition ever made it to market.
For a sense of how much stranger and more chaotic a single day of shooting a famous group could get, it's worth comparing the Mad Day Out to another era's version of the same idea, Art Kane's 1958 photograph of 57 jazz musicians on a Harlem stoop, another case of one photographer trying to herd a room full of icons who all had somewhere else they'd rather be.
What makes McCullin's contribution unique isn't just who he photographed, but who he usually photographed. A man who'd spent the previous decade documenting famine, war and human suffering across Congo, Cyprus, Biafra and Vietnam spent one single day in the summer of 1968 photographing four musicians spitting water at a fountain and playing dead by the Thames. He never worked with the band again.
