Wasn’t there a Global Beatles Appreciation Day recently? I’m sure I saw a message online somewhere to that effect. I’m sure too that somewhere someone made one of those Batman slapping Robin memes about it. Robin saying ‘So what are you doing for Beatles Appreciation day…’ and Batman coming back with ‘EVERY day is Beatles Appreciation Day’. Anyway, it made me laugh, but that’s Capitalism for you. The machine must be fed. The beast is never sated.

So did I do anything for Global Beatles Appreciation Day? Does leafing through a few pages of Paul McCartney’s ‘Eyes Of The Storm’ book count? My younger self just spat in my face for saying that, but what use is the ageing process if one cannot thoroughly disgust one’s younger self? Sure, some things are Worth Holding On To, but in truth not much, and probably not the things one once thought to be the most important. Anything to do with music or Pop Culture in general falls into that category for me. Sacred Cows, global or personal, are there to be challenged I think. Casually discarded, even. So The Beatles? Yeah, they’re okay.

The truth is that I’ve rather enjoyed poking around a little in the realm of The Beatles. Barely scratching the surface of course, but that’s okay because frankly the depths of obsessive forensic research that some (many?!) like to go in for is a little bit scary. I mean, it’s fine, it really is. Whatever floats your boat, and it’s really just more evidence of my own relative shallowness and/or spectacular mediocrity with a bit of mild ADHD in the mix. So I’ve dabbled. Paddled in the shallow end. Listened to a few things and read a few books that my Texas Correspondent William Crain has prodded me with over the years. He likes to joke he’s made me into Devon’s Number One Beatles Fan. Man, I wouldn’t even get admitted to the fan club meetings and I’m still wearing THAT badge with a little perverse pride.

But what about Macca’s photographs? 1964 and all that. I admit that although I just said that Pop Culture in general is no longer as big a deal to me as it once was, there is something lastingly seductive about certain periods of time, and that early 1960s period is one. I just watched an old Éric Rohmer short about ’Nadja à Paris’ which is charming and hugely evocative. Everyone looks smart and stylish and you cannot smell the Parisian sewers, or all the cigarette smoke, which is a bonus. I’m glad you cannot smell the cigarette smoke in McCartney’s photographs, because there are a lot of fags in them. Cue period ‘joke’ about the number of homosexuals in the Entertainment Industry. Boom Boom.

The photographs are great. Surprisingly so, perhaps, but then again perhaps not, because it does seem that McCartney was a fairly gifted multidisciplinary artist from the off. There is a high degree of visual literacy in the photographs, much of it no doubt sub-consciously developed from an immersion in the form that he’d have consumed through the fledgling Youth Media of the 1950s and of course from being within the milieu of those bohemian German artists, notably Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer. Ah, the crucible of youthful creative surges. Soaking it all up and letting it seep out again in new forms. Click.

There are, of course, a lot of photographs of McCartney’s fellow band members in the book . There are some lovely shots, many of them with an intimacy only someone like McCartney could achieve. Yet such is the ubiquity of imagery of the characters that none of these photographs feel particularly, ah, newsworthy, as it were. Do they add anything to the Story? I’m not sure. It’s a question for a much more devoted and educated person and you know I’d probably tune out the answer after a couple of minutes.

So my favourite photographs in the book are not of members of the Beatles but the ones of the supporting cast, if you will. Brian Epstein in shorts in Miami. Mal Evans looking straight in a suit and tie, strangely appearing much older than he would just five years later in the ‘Get Back’ footage. George Martin and Judy Lockhart-Smith poolside, also in Miami. Paul’s ‘Miami date’ Diane Levine looking a little shy and bemused, Lennon fuzzy from the shallow depth of field sitting cross legged on the marina pontoon in the middle ground. Also notable are the shots of other artists. Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, Cilla Black, The Vernon Girls, Billy J Kramer looking tortured and exquisite on stage, a moment of light in a sea of blackness. Click. Johnny Halliday and Sophie Hardy. Sylvie Vartan bleached in the spotlight. McCartney showing a genuine interest in the artists surrounding him and also, in these kind of shots, in the art of photography itself.

Then there are the fans. Lots, and lots of fans. The long haired beatnik girl captured as she in turn takes snaps of Lennon biting his nails. Fuzzy, noisy, cloudy and quite perfect. There is a mirror in the dressing room that looks just like the one my grandparent’s had. The one that now hangs in our own bedroom. Time glitches and bends through the walls. Click. Or the Parisian fans on the street looking kinda non-plussed as Parisians are wont to do. And is that Rohmer’s Nadja sitting it that terrace cafe idly smoking a cigarette? Click. Americans in Europe are one thing, but the ones in their native land are another matter. Hysterical. Everything bubbling and ready to burst. Click! Pow! Crash! And click again.

The book’s cover shot is perfect. Lots of noise, literally. Kids pursuing The Beatles’ car down West Fifty-Eighth in Manhattan. Chaos. Mayhem. It’s a cinematic shot so no surprise to learn that the chasing crowd scenes in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ were based on moments like this. My favourite though is another one taken from inside the car looking out, this time at just a few faces eagerly but politely peering in. The car window makes the perfect frame with a foregrounded arm (a fellow Beatle?) making for a barrier to the right edge of the shot. The torso of a police officer (from the 83rd Precinct?) lurks to the right, his badge gleaming. There is something strangely humble about this photograph. A gentle hopefulness.

Then too there is, simply, America. Okay, it’s no ‘The Americans’ and McCartney is no Robert Frank (and nor would he pretend to be) but there are flashes of Franks’ America as McCartney shoots police officers in the snow and the exterior of a Washington ART cinema advertising ‘Christine Keeler Goes Nudist’. Most startling, perhaps, is the high key close up of a motorcycle police officer’s handgun gleaming like the chrome on his engine. A reminder that this country might ostensibly speak the same language as the one McCartney grew up in, but is still peculiarly alien and Other. And, indeed, vice versa.

Now as already pointed out, I’m no aficionado of The Beatles and am quite content not to be so. In my limited exposure, however, McCartney would be my most favoured Fab and Lennon my least with The Quiet One and Ringo hovering somewhere between. I mean, I certainly never laughed when he got shot, but equally I never warmed to Lennon. He has always seemed like he’d have been the kind of kid who’d have bullied me in school, and ‘Imagine’ remains one of my most detested songs of all time. But you know what? I have zero interest in any lengthy debate or argument about it. My mantra in recent years has become ‘everyone is damaged and everyone has their reasons.’ And I’d have thought that not particularly digging John Lennon is hardly the most defining aspect of one’s personality. Or ought not to be. And, indeed, vice-versa.

There is an element of this in McCartney’s written reflections in the book too. Not specifically about Lennon, although there is perhaps a shiver of that, but more a reconciliation with The Past. The book feels like an attempt to enforce a partial reclamation of personal history from the furnace of endless public consumption (whilst inevitably, paradoxically, feeding those very flames). There is a strong sense throughout the book of these photographs being an inversion of the media process, a rebuttal if you like to the clamouring juggernaut of Success and Industry and Commerce that one fundamentally senses will overwhelm (or is that Hindsight infecting my reading of the text?).

So ‘Eyes Of The Storm’ feels like a gasp for breath in the exhilarating white heat of the moment; like fighting in the maw of the beast into whose grip one has gone willingly and to whom one knows one must ultimately surrender, but fighting nonetheless. For one’s identity? For the naive insecurity of Youth? A barrage of imagery, certainly, yet no apologies for that because McCartney’s photographs are also a barrage of questions, answers, possibilities and blind alleys. They capture a hinge point between the beforetime and the yet-to-be. Some things are ending and others beginning. Blink (or have been born a few years either side of X marks the spot) and you might have missed it. Click.

Me? I don’t mind that I missed it, and certainly don’t mind having held The Beatles in such low regard for such a long time, just as I don’t mind that I’ve now mellowed enough to dig a lot of what they made, both as a group and as individuals. And whilst it is easy to say that we no longer need a constant re-affirmation of their position within the Pantheon of Popular Culture, equally it’s easy to forget that there were certainly periods when the opposite was true and that it might yet be again.

So for now, it’s thumbs aloft.

Click.