Sir Paul McCartney isn’t living in the past. He’s 80 years old and he’s set to appear on Dolly Parton’s Rock Star covers album, and he’s not far removed from touring the US and headlining Glastonbury Festival. But he does seem to enjoy revisiting the past, from recreating The Beatles’ Abbey Road cover to recalling the late Queen Elizabeth II knighting him.
Add 1964: Eyes Of The Storm to McCartney’s list of welcomed reminders of the past. McCartney announced the photo archive today, January 25. It will be published as a book on June 13 and exhibited at London’s National Portrait Gallery from June 28 to October 1.
Per a press release, the 275-photograph collection was shot by McCartney between “the end of 1963 and beginning of 1964 when Beatlemania erupted in the UK and, after the band’s first visit to the USA, they became the most famous people on the planet.” McCartney re-discovered “an extraordinary trove of nearly 1,000 photographs taken … on a 35mm camera” in his personal archive in 2020.
The collection captures moments in Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, DC, and Miami and includes “many never-before-seen portraits of John [Lennon], George [Harrison] and Ringo [Starr].”
“Anyone who rediscovers a personal relic or family treasure is instantly flooded with memories and emotions, which then trigger associations buried in the haze of time,” McCartney said in a statement. “This was exactly my experience in seeing these photos, all taken over an intense three-month period of travel, culminating in February 1964. It was a wonderful sensation to be plunged right back. Here was my own record of our first huge trip, a photographic journal of The Beatles in six cities, beginning in Liverpool and London, followed by Paris (where John and I had been ordinary hitchhikers three years before), and then what we regarded as the big time, our first visit as a group to America.”
The $75 336-page book will publish through Liveright/W. W. Norton in the US and Allen Lane/Penguin Press in the UK.
Learn more about 1964: Eyes Of The Storm from McCartney’s and National Portrait Gallery’s Instagram posts below.