In my early 20s, I used to buy a lot of vinyl records from damp cardboard boxes in shops with plastic strips instead of doors, back when nobody wanted vinyl. Old records went for about 50p a throw, which seems like crazy talk now that even charity shops know to price the good stuff for a tenner.
A lot of records I bought didn’t have sleeves, and one of my favourites was the first Paul McCartney solo LP, the lovely direct-inject home recording one that’s got Maybe I’m Amazed on it, which he did as his escape rocket from The Beatles. I played it a lot, and really liked it, so years later, when I eventually bought a cheap copy with the actual sleeve intact, I was excited. Not only because it’s a good record, but because it’s an amazing cover. It’s part of the package. I didn’t really own the record until I had the cover.
As a Beatle nerd I loved that the cover told the story of Abbey Road and the Beatle breakup. Life’s not a bowl of cherries, you know? Sometimes stuff gets spilt. Look at all the lovely sweet cherries strewn across a zebra crossing. The black and white stripes? You’ll recognise them from the other record we just put out. It’s a visual gag, and the blood red is really dramatic against the monochrome slashes. Like a murder scene. It tells a story. It’s quite bitter.
That colour palette, and the staging, is incredible. It’s a very seventies album cover for 1970. It’s like something by Hignosis for Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. It’s, I’d say, better than most of the Beatles albums as a piece of high-end stereo Hi-Fi era sleeve design that you’d put in a coffee table book. Those perfect, primary coloured spheres are the same ones Macca is going to use on Venus and Mars. It’s abstract, but photographic. It’s not messy and busy, like Revolver or Pepper. It’s not human like Hard Day’s Night or With The Beatles. It’s not a bleak gag like the White Album. It’s not even got his famous face on it. It’s a little story to peer into. It’s about total control of an image. It’s design.
But a couple of years ago, I saw this snapshot of Linda on holiday with Paul in 1969.
And I thought: Bloody hell. Those are the cherries.
So that’s not a zebra crossing. It’s a wall. In bright Antigua sunlight. The black stripes are shadow, not tarmac. The bowl just happens to be sitting on top of the wall. It’s not a painstakingly staged graphic joke about Abbey Road at all. It’s a holiday snap.
Look at it again, and they’re not perfect art department spheres placed in position to tell a cynical story about The Beatles. The wall is covered in splodge and mess and juice. It’s casual, candid, intimate. It’s a scrapbook snap, like the rest of the photos inside the gatefold sleeve.
Paul and Linda were feeding birds, on holiday, from a bowl, on a wall, in the sun. That’s what the picture is of.
But Linda saw those cherries and that bowl and that wall and took a picture of them that told a completely different story. Because she was an amazing photographer, with a remarkable eye. To see that shadow and know it would flatten itself out in the harsh sun. To find the perfect angle to remove the detail, and turn a holiday snap into an abstract square of colour and shape that’s as good as any painstaking bit of 70s album art studio set dressing.
Taking good photos is really hard, because it’s really easy. There are minimal barriers to entry, and an almost instant learning curve. Anyone can do it badly. In that sense, it’s very much like playing the bass guitar.
The McCartneys were masters of taking a thing you can learn to do badly in seconds, whether playing the bass guitar or taking photographs, and doing it completely brilliantly.
She was really, really good, wasn’t she?