News from the uninformed

The above pictured photo has been a “news” item for a couple of days, and today it showed up over at BBC News.

The reality is, this and many more photos were from a film roll in Yoko Ono’s camera, which was stolen in 1969. They have been published many places on the internet and in Beatles fanzines, and a number of them were published in a British tabloid newspaper back in the nineties.

Don’t believe the “Ballad of John & Yoko” theory over at BBC News, the photos are from the recording of Abbey Road, after Lennon had brought a bed to the studio. The above photo is taken from Yoko’s point of view in the bed.

In the summer of 1969, John and Yoko had been in a car accident while in Scotland, and the doctor had ordered Yoko to stay in bed for some time. The others could not believe their own eyes when, on July 9, John and Yoko turned up in the studio with a big bed for Yoko to rest in.

For the next several weeks, Yoko practically lived in that bed. John even requested a microphone to be set up for her so that he could hear her through the headphones.

One day, Yoko Ono had gained some strength and jumped out of her “sick bed” to nick one of George Harrison’s biscuits from a packet he had put on his guitar amplifier.  Harrison made it clear that Yoko had crossed the line, to put it mildly, and an argument broke out between him and Lennon. Fortunately it died out pretty quickly.

Other photos show Yoko, Pattie Harrison and Linda McCartney in the same bed, and there are also some photos of the Beatles in a movie theatre, enjoying a preview of an early cut of the “Let It Be” film. The two most controversial photos from this film roll were nude photos of John Lennon. Here’s how one of these were depicted in the British tabloid Daily Mirror:

A number of the photos were published in the Beatle Photo Blog in February this year, which we also reported here. Ever since 1969, the photos have circulated among the girls who were nicknamed “Apple scruffs”.

Another, sad and misinformed story was over at the Daily Mail, who thought that someone had found a treasure trove of hitherto unseen Beatles photos.