The Lennon McCartney fake romance

Real photo of John and Paul. Photo: David Bailey

Someone out there on the internet has an agenda: to make the Lennon-McCartney relationship closer than it was. I have no clue why, but this is equivalent to fan fiction, only done by editing photos. Typically, a photo of John and Paul standing together will be edited by moving them closer to each other. And sometimes very close, like the following example:

Real photo of John and Paul in the studio, singing into the same microphone.

Someone’s wet dream, accomplished by photo editing.

This photo spreads like wildfire on social media and Pinterest. The latter is also usually the culprit when people are posting photos with a wrong caption. When you image search with Google, photos from Pinterest will show up with a caption or quote taken from another photo on the same Pinterest board.

But let’s stick with the topic, here’s another example:

Top: real photo, bottom: same photo, edited.

We have nothing against gays here, but we are against fakery unexplained. And that’s the trouble with these photos, they are usually presented without any explanation and people who are not used to seeing the originals are fooled. I have come across several of the faked photos in this blog post on Facebook, where the person who posted has believed them to be real. Fortunately, the Facebook groups I have seen them in have had experienced fans pointing out that there’s something wrong with the picture.

A magazine cutting, photo taken at the George V Hotel near the Champs Elysées, Paris, France, 1965.

Ringo obscured because the photo enthusiast wanted to bring Paul closer to John.

I started out writing about the Beatles to correct mistakes and myths. The Beatles history is full of myths, which has been corrected by later accounts by either members of the band, people who were close to them or historians with documented proof. And yet, the myths just continue. Why? Both because some myths make better stories than the truth and because the people in general are not likely to read articles that expose the myths as untrue. Still, I keep on fighting this losing battle, which is why I am posting this.

Photo taken during the filming of Strawberry Fields Forever

Fakery of same.

This particular direction in the world of Beatles fan fiction is called “McLennon”, so you’ll find more examples if you do an internet search for that. Fan fiction usually resides at internet sites like Tumblr and Deviantart and their like. Places that often contain wonderful images, but when they go astray like this, people are taking them at face value.

Yes I know, by posting these photos here, even more people are going to spread them via their Pinterest boards etc without any comment. Yet, I urge you to, whenever you find one of these images that tries to imply a Lennon-McCartney romance, comment by posting a link to this blog post. I even made a shortened link for you to use: https://tinyurl.com/lmw281f

See what I did there? Thank you.

If you want to suggest that something was going on, there’s always real photos to choose from.