‘The Beatles used to experiment with chords, I did the same with photography’
Mike McCartney talks to David Lister about his career, the 1960s and ‘Our Kid’ – his brother Paul
It could have been John, Paul, George and Mike,” Mike McCartney tells me a little wistfully, but with a characteristic twinkle in his eye.
Paul’s younger brother has recently been reminded of a brief chapter in his life that, somewhat astonishingly, he had partly forgotten over the years. “I bumped into someone who was in the Quarrymen [an early incarnation of The Beatles] and he reminded me that I drummed for them before I broke my arm. So, I suppose I could have ended up drummer for The Beatles. But would it have worked? There’s not a great history of brothers in rock bands. Look at the Gallaghers.”
Besides, Mike, who actually gets on really well with his older sibling, has more pressing matters in hand than thinking of what might have been. He is about to reform his successful 1960s band Scaffold, along with Liverpool poet Roger McGough and entertainer John Gorman. The group, in which Mike was on vocals under his stage name Mike McGear, had big novelty hits with “Thank U Very Much” and “Lily the Pink”. They will play on 29 October at the Everyman theatre in Liverpool, where they started out.
“We had to reform,” he told me when I met him for a chat about the old days. “How many 60s groups can you find where all the members are still alive? And still talking to each other.”
Mike, 78, and two years younger than Paul (who he calls “Our Kid”), is old-style Liverpudlian in that he rarely goes more than a sentence or two without an impishly mischievous remark. And old-style Liverpool is what he is preoccupied with right now. An accomplished photographer, he has a weighty tome out with his pictures of the Liverpool of his youth, his family and, not insignificantly, fascinating snapshots of the early Beatles, particularly Paul and John forging their craft in the McCartneys’ childhood home, a two-up, two-down council house, 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton, Liverpool (now a National Trust property).
“The first impression you get as you walk inside is how cold it is,” says Mike. “The only place that was warm in the whole house was when the fire was alight, here in the front parlour. You’d have a bath upstairs and then run downstairs, freezing cold, and Mum would say ‘right, come on.’ She’d do Our Kid first, him being the elder one, and then me. I’d sit in front of the fire, put my head down and she would tousle it with her hand to dry it.”
Mike and Paul’s mother, Mary, died of cancer after just a few months in the house, and the two teenagers found solace in music and photography. Some of the pictures in Mike’s book have never been seen before. All are now a fascinating part of music and social history.
“I remember a young man once, looking in through Mum’s net curtains,” Mike tells me. “Our Kid said, ‘I’ve just met this bloke and we’re working together. He’s my new mate called John. He’s coming round’. He looked a bit cool – he had sideburns, ‘sidies’ and skintight jeans, ‘drainies’. Dad wouldn’t let us have drainies, though Our Kid found a way to get round that. And I thought, whoa, it’s got to be this John bloke.”
Paul and his friend John Lennon, whom Paul met when he was 15 and John 17, wrote and rehearsed songs in the front parlour of the house, and Mike was regularly on hand with his camera. John had lost his own mother in a road accident, and he and Paul had this bond between them as well as their shared love of music.
I didn’t know then they were going to become songwriters of historic genius. In one picture I have John and Paul deliberately out of focus because I wanted to highlight the guitar. The guitar!
Mike has told the National Trust (and they are now able to tell visitors to the house) how his mother, a midwife, saw the family’s move to Forthlin Road as an important social step up. He recalls there being three different papers on the parlour walls because, in Mary’s opinion, Sanderson wallpaper was the best that money could buy, but she could only afford roll-ends. When she died the boys’ father Jim, a cotton salesman and keen musician, encouraged them to process their grief through music and photography. He bought them a guitar and a banjo, and rather more mysteriously a drum kit “that fell off the back of a lorry.”
Mike was more interested in perfecting his craft as a would-be photographer than recording a piece of history, as he had no idea it was going to be a piece of history.
One of his favourite photographs is I Saw Her Standing There, which shows John and Paul hunched over their guitars, studiously working on the track which opened The Beatles’ debut album.
“That picture from November 1962 is one of my favourites,” says Mike. “Our Kid is left-handed, so the composition balances nicely, but more importantly, they’re rehearsing to Our Kid’s school book, and they’ve just written some words. If you look closely, you can actually see I Saw Her Standing There as the headline, and where they’ve crossed out and made corrections.
“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 and then play them with the band. It shows the camaraderie, the togetherness and the professionalism of what they did.”
Another shows John, Paul and George with one of their rock’n’roll heroes, Gene Vincent when the Beatles were supporting him on a tour. They all have their backs to the camera with Vincent turning round as the main object of the photo. “But look at it carefully,” Mike says to me. “You can see John is goosing him. He’s goosing him, look!” Sure enough, the young Lennon looks about to pinch Gene Vincent’s bum.
The Beatles with their back to their camera, The Beatles in another picture out of focus. “Yes,” says Mike, “Because I didn’t know then they were going to become songwriters of historic genius. In one picture I have John and Paul deliberately out of focus because I wanted to highlight the guitar. The guitar!”
It’s still a matter of regret to Mike that he didn’t get into Liverpool art school. “I tried... I said to John at the time ‘how is it I couldn’t get in and you got in? He immediately drew a picture of two bums talking to each other. ‘That’s how’ he said.”
There are a number of previously unseen pictures including a teenage Mike and Paul pretending to be Elvis, and pictures Mike took of Chuck Berry in Liverpool, and John and Yoko in Liverpool.
Describing another favourite picture of his, Mike says: “Our Kid’s out there in the garden, under the washing. It’s after Mum died. He used to play with his guitar, just lost. We both were. I had my photography to get lost in. Paul would get lost in that guitar. I saw him in the garden, framed through Mum’s net curtains, and wanted to capture it. I used to develop my pictures in my bedroom. I’d use my Rollei Magic camera that Our Kid brought back from Hamburg so I could take his picture to make him look like Elvis.”
Of course, being Paul’s brother gave Mike a unique “in” to The Beatles’ world and his access in those early days resulted in photos no other photographer could get. One picture of a rehearsal at Liverpool’s famous Cavern Club on 27 January 1963 has a relaxed John wearing his glasses. Mike points out: “It’s great to see John in his glasses. In the early days, he never let photographers take pictures of him with his glasses on, unless you were ‘family’”
Indeed, Paul, when I met him a few years ago, told me a marvellous story of how he and teenage John were rehearsing at his Forthlin home, and John said to him that he had seen a family up the road playing cards out in the front garden. Paul thought this incredible as it was freezing cold and snowing. Later that evening, Paul walked up the road to see the sight for himself, and it was a nativity scene. John, usually too vain to wear his glasses, had seen it as a family playing cards.”
Mike says: “Certain pictures that I’ve taken have a lovely feel to them, performers like John Lennon and Sandie Shaw had this magnetism about them and I often wondered why. Then I worked out it was because they were both blind as bats when they took their glasses of, so when they gazed out into the audience they had this distant look in their eyes because it was all a blur to them. All the girls thought John was looking at them, but really he couldn’t see a thing.”
Among the many fascinating photos in the book, insights into those early years of the world’s most famous band, is a picture of the late Stuart Sutcliffe, an early member of the group, sometimes called “the fifth Beatle” and at the time arguably the artiest member of the group. Mike pictured him back in Liverpool from the band’s sojourn in Hamburg, wearing a jacket that had no collar, soon to become the famous Beatles Jacket that the band wore on stage and fans around the world imitated. “Stu walked into the Cavern wearing a jacket that had no collar,” says Mike. “Everyone pissed themselves laughing at him. The next thing you know we were all wearing them, The Beatles included.”
Mike’s photos of 1950s and ’60s Liverpool show the styles and fashions of the time, and it’s a bit of a revelation that he played a small part himself in keeping the girls of Liverpool abreast of the latest fashions. “After school, I went into hairdressing and I used to do a few ‘beehive’ hairstyles for the girls,” he says. “I would backcomb their hair and keep building it up to get the look. Some of them were outrageous.”
There are even pictures of Paul and his then-girlfriend Jane Asher flying a kite, and one of Mike with Mick Jagger practising dance moves “me teaching Mick Jager how to dance” he says tongue in cheek. Mike’s photographs are undoubtedly a snapshot of an era that the combination of being part of the experience, having amazing access, and the gift of an accomplished photographer’s eye can deliver.
“Like The Beatles used to experiment with chords, lyrics and keys, I did the same with photography. I was always experimenting,” says Mike.
“The ’50s and ’60s were a time when us working-class folk all had nothing and little to no chance of getting anything. We were all equal in our nothingness, but at least we could dream of escaping our poverty, of winning the pools, or being bigger than Elvis! I hope that some of the images I took capture that feeling.”
“Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool”, the new limited edition book by Mike McCartney, is now available to order from MikeMcCartneyBook.com
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