BOOK: ‘The Beatles’ chronicles the band’s rise through the lens of celebrity photographer Terry O’Neill

We loved them, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Lennon, with his wit and little round glasses. Paul McCartney, grinning as he played that violin-shaped bass. George Harrison, spiritual, mysterious, and intense. And Ringo Starr cheerfully keeping beat.

The Beatles loved the camera almost as much as the camera loved them. Frequently pressing the shutter was Terry O’Neill. He was there from the beginning and after the end.

O’Neill’s photographs, all together now, in “The Beatles: The Definitive Collection,” capture several amazing decades. Even diehard fans will find unfamiliar images.

O’Neill, who died in 2019, was a working-class English kid and amateur drummer when he began shooting for Britain’s The Daily Sketch. He was 21, “the youngest photographer on Fleet Street,” he says. The tabloid’s photo editor thought him a good choice to document Britain’s younger generation.

“One day, my editor said to me, ‘There’s a new young band recording at Abbey Road, and we want you to go over and take some pictures,’” O’Neill recalled. “I knew a lot of the bands and the club scene in London, but this one was down from Liverpool… Well, that band turned out to be The Beatles.”

It was July 1, 1963, and the Beatles were at their new label recording a single, “She Loves You.” That song would soon change their lives, just as they would eventually change the culture. But that summer afternoon felt like just another day.

“It was unionized then,” O’Neill says of Britain’s recording industry. “Technicians in brown work coats, shirts and ties, who had to be paid overtime and took tea breaks. I didn’t like the light in the studio, so during one of those union breaks, I took the Beatles out back in the yard for a portrait.”

The Beatles, in button-downs and ties, pretended to play a song for the camera. No guitars were plugged in. The drum kit was too big to lug outside, so Starr held drumsticks and a cymbal in the back. The setting — a small, bricked-in lot — resembled a shabby backyard.

But the love affair between the Beatles, and the camera, was already in bloom.

Still, the photographs sat unused for weeks. Finally, on a slow news day, the paper ran one on the front page. The edition sold out.

“My pictures were some of the very first press photographs ever taken of the group,” O’Neill writes, “It was the beginning of pop pictures in newspapers.”

It was also the beginning of Beatlemania, which O’Neill faithfully documented.

He caught them at recording sessions at Abbey Road, where security guards soon had to keep screaming fans from breaking in. And, O’Neill snapped them meeting Marlene Dietrich before a charity gala.

O’Neill photographed them shooting the concert sequences for “A Hard Day’s Night” while a 13-year-old Phil Collins cheered from the audience.

Their professional relationship quickly became personal, with O’Neill becoming particularly close with Starr. They traipsed around London together, O’Neill grabbing a shot in front of 10 Downing St., where the drummer did his Winston Churchill impression.

“There was this thing happening, a buzz on the street,” O’Neill says of those days of swinging London. “Things seemed to be changing: music, fashion, young people everywhere having a good time, upsetting the older generation. It was news, and I was in the right place at the right time, with the right attitude.”

No one could have predicted if the fame and money would endure. Inspired by Vidal Sassoon, Starr had his Plan B: opening a chain of hairdressing salons. Their manager, Brian Epstein, seized every opportunity. He sent them on world tours, booked them on TV specials, and licensed their images for everything from cartoons to cheap wigs.

“I remember we’d sit around at his club called the Ad Lib Club round the back of Leicester Square — me, The Stones, The Beatles,” O’Neill wrote. “We would have a few pints and talk about what we were going to do once this was over. None of us thought that the success we were having was going to last.”

Eventually, though, the Beatles wearied of the endless travel, the constant personal appearances, and guest shots on variety shows. A particular low-point was “Another Beatles Christmas Show,” a 1964 theatrical performance with comic skits. In one, appearing on stage in fur-lined parkas, they played Antarctic explorers in pursuit of the Abominable Snowman.

“Paul, John, George, and Ringo hated it,” O’Neill says of that show, “and vowed never to undertake anything similar again.”

Other appearances began to be jettisoned. The band stopped touring in 1966. They spent more time locked away in the recording studios — where neckties were no longer required, and breaks for marijuana replaced those for tea. They began to develop their individual interests — Harrison pushing deeper into religion, Lennon exploring the avant-garde.

By the late ‘60s, O’Neill’s photographs of them grew fewer and further between. There are shots of Lennon and Harrison at the grand opening of the Apple Store (the Beatles’ unsuccessful boutique, not today’s high-tech emporium). Several sequences document Starr’s offbeat acting career — on the set of “The Magic Christian” with a whip-wielding Raquel Welch and rehearsing for an appearance on “Laugh-In.”

Then, in 1970, the band broke up.

There are no pictures here of Lennon after that and no explanation from O’Neill. Perhaps it’s that the musician began spending more time in New York and with his new wife, Yoko Ono. Perhaps as the star grew more serious and political, posing for pictures began to seem silly. Still, Lennon simply disappears from the book.

Harrison nearly pulls his own vanishing act. There are a few shots of him, looking serenely contemplative, at his country estate in 1974 and some joyful ones of him at Starr’s wedding to Barbara Bach in 1981. Lennon and McCartney always garnered the majority of the publicity anyway, and once the Beatles stopped being an obligatory commercial concern, Harrison lost any remaining interest in promoting the image.

McCartney and Starr, though, never had any conflicts about celebrity or show business. They remained O’Neill’s friends and frequent subjects.

O’Neill was there for the early years of McCartney’s solo career as he tried different approaches and looks. And was there for the launch of Wings. O’Neill also documented McCartney’s ambitious (and failed) movie effort from 1984, “Give My Regards to Broad Street.”

Best, though, are the shots from Starr’s wedding. O’Neill doubled as a guest and official photographer, capturing the ceremony and then moving on to the raucous reception. There, McCartney took over the piano, Starr casually picked up a guitar, and the world’s last and most exclusive Beatles concert rocked the house.

O’Neill would go on to take many photographs of other celebrities in England and Hollywood. Briefly married to Faye Dunaway, he snapped the famous poolside photo of her the day after her Oscar win for “Network.”

He occasionally got his old mates to sit for him – Starr flashing a peace sign sometime in the early 2000s, McCartney – “a pal since the very start” – posing for a story in The Sunday Times Magazine in 2008.

But the great days — the glory days — were just fond memories.

“They were young,” O’Neill says. “I was young, and the world was young.”