Paul McCartney, reading the Observer, 20 Forthlin Road, 21 October 1962. Photograph: Mike McCartney
This intimate portrait of Paul McCartney was taken by his brother before Beatlemania put an end to ordinary life
Mike McCartney took this picture of Paul reading the Observer a couple of weeks after the release of the Beatles’ first single, Love Me Do, in October 1962. The record had reached number 17 in the charts. He and Paul were still living at home, 20 Forthlin Road, in Allerton, south Liverpool. “This was the time before the time, we were just working-class Liverpool people trying to survive with our dad after our mum had died.” Mike said.
Mike was 18 and had just formed his band the Scaffold, while working as a hairdresser. Paul, a couple of years older, had brought him back a Rolleicord camera from Hamburg, a gift from Astrid Kirchherr, who had befriended the Beatles when they played there. The brothers were experimenting with it, while their dad was out at work as a cotton salesman. “My parents always got the Observer rather than the Mirror because they wanted us to try to better ourselves,” Mike recalls. “Our mum would have been horrified to see the springs coming through the arm of the chair.”
The house at Forthlin Road has been restored to its 1962 life – when Paul and John Lennon would be writing songs on this armchair – by the National Trust, using Mike’s photographs. Mike wrote a poem for the project, part of which reads: “In eight short years/Four walls gave rise/To a world changed for ever/Under marmalade skies.”
Eighteen months after this picture was taken, he recalls, “we all had to leave Forthlin Road for good at midnight one night, because Beatlemania had started, and if we’d left in the daylight, the fans would have seen what was happening and stripped the house bare.”
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