Bailey takes credit for “Eight Days A Week”

Collectors’ edition of GQ magazine

In a collectors’ edition of the magazine GQ there are two John Lennon-related interviews. One is with Yoko Ono, recounting what it was like to meet John for the first time, the other with photographer David Bailey. He talks about a tesnion between John and Paul, a tension that made him ask the pair to look in f´different directions when he took their photo. But it was not as tense as between the Oasis brothers, Liam and Noel Gallagher, who he photographed for their first Rolling Stone cover:  “I did it in ten minutes because I thought they were going to kill each other.”

Bailey’s first meeting with Paul McCartney also got off on a bad note, when the photographer opened with “Michelle, my belle’ – are you f***ing joking, Paul?” Paul’s reply was “Piss off!”, according to Bailey, who was recently reminded of the incident by Paul himself.

The photographer talks about smoking joints with Lennon on the roof of the Ad Lib club in London. He also takes credit for having invented the title of “Eight Days A Week”: “John Lennon was in the Ad Lib one night and he asked me how hard I worked. And I said, ‘How hard do I work? I’ll tell you, John, I work eight days a week.'”

You can read both the Yoko Ono interview and the David Bailey interview online here.