“Mad Day Out” book coming

28th of July 1968 The Beatles had an appointment for a new group photo session. Apple needed updated Beatles photos to promote their new recordings. The Beatles agreed beacuse they didn’t like to see their old photos in the newspapers. They had changed a lot since 1966 when they stopped going on tour and since then there were few public photos of the band.

Don McCullin was the official photographer but a group of photographers came along: Tom Murray, Ronald Fitzgibbon and Stephen Goldblatt. The Beatles’ assistant Mal Evans and his son Gary, Tony Bramwell from Apple, Lennon’s girlfriend Yoko Ono and Paul’s then girlfriend Francie Schwartz also accompanied The Beatles.

Chief photographer Don McCullin had just returned from covering the bitter fighting during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and was the most hardened photo journalist in the field. On Sunday 28 September he met the Beatles at the Sunday Times studio and began to photograph them in colour for a Life magazine cover. The day that followed has become known in Beatles lore as ‘The Mad Day Out’. McCullin shot twenty rolls of black-and-white film in various locations across London, from the banks of the Thames to Paul McCartney’s garden.

See more photos and an interview with the photographer over at Daily Mail.

The 144 pages big hardcover book will be released on October 14th in the UK at £12.20 from the Amazon (UK) store and on October 19th in the USA at $16.47 from Amazon.com.

Junior photographer Tom Murray, who accompanied McCullin that day has staged popular photo exhibitions from the photos he took, but he only had two rolls of film, from which he kept 23 negatives, McCullin shot twenty rolls.