Some biographies give you a glimpse into music history. Others make you feel like you’ve stumbled into a private family album belonging to the greatest band that ever lived.
There are Beatles fans, and then there are Beatles obsessives. You know the type. The ones who can tell you which version of a song appeared on which release, who played what on a particular recording, and why a seemingly insignificant moment in a documentary deserves an entire afternoon of discussion. The ones who have spent years devouring every photograph, interview, bootleg and scrap of Beatles history they can get their hands on, convinced there must still be something out there they haven’t seen.
Enter THE THIRD EYE: Early Photographs, a remarkable collection of George Harrison’s personal photography, published by Penguin Random House, and quite possibly one of the most exciting things to land in the hands of a Beatles tragic in some time.
We’ve seen the Beatles from just about every conceivable angle. We’ve watched the documentaries, read the biographies, studied the album sleeves and pored over countless photographs of four lads from Liverpool who somehow changed the world. But there’s something genuinely mind-blowing about seeing these moments through George’s own lens, particularly when so many of the photographs have never been collected in a book like this before.
Spanning the years 1963 to 1969, THE THIRD EYE brings together more than 200 photographs and 8mm film stills, capturing the Beatles at work, at play and in those rare moments when the machinery of Beatlemania momentarily loosened its grip. From their earliest adventures in America to Australia, Paris, India and beyond, this is history from the inside. Not another photographer positioned outside the barricades, but George Harrison himself, camera in hand, documenting the extraordinary world he was living in.
Source: fortemagazine.com.au/Tammy Walters