The Eyes Of The Beatlemania Storm: Paul McCartney Talks To Stanley Tucci
The conversation took place to highlight ‘Eyes Of The Storm,’ the new photographic exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and accompanying book.
Paul McCartney has shared a clip from his recent on-stage interview with actor Stanley Tucci at the recently-reopened National Portrait Gallery in London. The full livestreamed event is available to watch on demand this week, up until Thursday (6).
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In the excerpt, Tucci asks McCartney about John Lennon’s poor eyesight, and the fact that he wore glasses, but usually, as the group came to prominence, only in private. Paul describes one particularly amusing scene after a late-night songwriting session at his house, after which Lennon walked home around midnight and the next day, told McCartney that he had been amazed to see people on the corner of Booker Avenue “out on the porch playing cards.”
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Says Paul: “I had to investigate, so I went round and had a look. It was a nativity scene. They weren’t playing cards, they were all bent over the baby Jesus. So that’s why he needed glasses.”
The conversation took place to highlight the new photographic exhibition Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm, which opened at the NPG on June 28 and runs until October 1. The striking images cast a unique light on what it was like to be on the inside looking out, as Beatlemania first took hold in the UK and then around the world. The trove of nearly 1,000 of McCartney’s photographs, taken on a 35mm camera, were rediscovered in his archive in 2020.
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Some 275 of the images feature in the new book 1964: Eyes of the Storm, taken in Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, and Miami, with many unseen portraits of Paul’s bandmates. “What else can you call it – pandemonium,” he muses in his foreword to the book, which also features Beatleland, an Introduction by Harvard historian and New Yorker essayist Jill Lepore; a preface by Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, and Another Lens, an essay by Senior Curator Rosie Broadley.
