Maybe it's also the best picture of the Beatles ever taken. Don McCullin. It is weird. It can't be a set up, McCullin isn't that sort of photographer. And the fabs were always up for pictures of them clowning around. But this isn't typical clowning is it?
Chief clown Lennon plays dead here. Or dying, or sick or something. An angelic McCartney looks at him attentively. Ringo looks like one of those suffering mothers in McCullin's war photographs. And Harrison, uninvolved, severe, just stares straight into the camera.
As I've never seen it before I guess they never released it at the time as not good for their image. Or maybe they saw it as some arty exercise. Though I'm not sure what to read into it. Four guys at the top of the world and the top of their game reveal their vulnerability, their mortality perhaps? (Lennon was the first to die, remember)
Of course it looks more like a McCullin photo than a Beatles photo. Though what he or what the Beatles thought they were playing at here is beyond me. Whatever it was, it's very strange, very haunting, very odd.
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