The Fab Four we never knew

Sir Paul McCartney’s brother shares unseen pictures of the Beatles

WHEN the Beatles recruited Ringo Starr as their new drummer, they joked that he wasn’t even the best one in the band, never mind in Liverpool.

Now it’s emerged that Sir Paul McCartney’s younger brother, Mike, also held ambitions to fill the hot seat at the drums. He has joked that if he hadn’t broken his arm he would have been the obvious selection instead of Ringo.

As it happens, he went on to pursue a successful career as a photographer and performance artist.

The Sunday Telegraph can now reveal some of Mike McCartney’s previously unseen photographs of the Beatles, which he discovered while going through boxes of films, negatives and prints in his archive – including the first colour photograph of the band when they were known as the Quarrymen.

One was taken in March 1958 at the home of Paul and Mike’s Auntie Jin, when George Harrison was 15 and their future as a band that would change the face of music lay in front of them.

“This may have been George’s first performance with the group. John without his glasses couldn’t see a thing, but we could clearly see from his red cheeks that he was bevvied.”

In another, his brother is captured carrying a drum kit out of the house. “Paul came home one day with a drum kit. It was perfect because I wanted to play the drums,” says Mr McCartney.

“Maybe if I hadn’t broken my arm I could have been a Beatle.”

Seeing the band so young in colour is a striking contrast to the monochrome that Mr McCartney and other photographers normally used at the time. “In those days colour film was very expensive so it would have been a special present from Dad,” he says. “We used to get him a £1 Havana de Cuba cigar every year for Christmas and he would have got this as my gift.”

The pictures are part of a body of work being published in book form in an intimate collection of portraits of the band that became known as the Fab Four.

One previously unseen photograph shows Paul with his then girlfriend, Jane Asher, watching Mr McCartney’s own band, the Scaffold, at a Liverpool music club alongside their friend Ivan Vaughan, who had introduced John to

Paul. Mr McCartney says: “I find lost photographs and drawings all the time. This will be my definitive statement of a magic era.”

He adds: “Back then we were just Liverpool lads trying to survive. It’s only in retrospect, when you see the photographs in their historical context, that you recognise their significance.”

One of the most striking images – and one of Sir Paul’s favourites – shows him and John in November 1962 sitting on chairs next to each other composing Saw Her Standing There, one of the early songs that would revolutionise the British music scene. It was the way the pair worked, guitar to guitar, a notebook for the lyrics in front of them, creating the Lennon and McCartney sound.

“Paul said this was one of the most important photographs I had ever taken because it showed him and John, exactly as they were together. They used to form ideas, write them out, rehearse, and then play them with the band,” says Mr McCartney, now 78.

“It shows the camaraderie, the togetherness and the professionalism of what they did. I still think about how lucky I was to capture this moment of musical history.”

Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool Collector’s Edition is available at mikemccartneybook.com