In 1968, Tom Murray was a young photographer at The Sunday Times when history landed in his lap.
“Don McCullin, the famous war photographer, said he was going to photograph some pop group and [asked if I] would drive him around,” says Murray with a chuckle. “As we were leaving he said, ‘Bring your camera, you might get some nice snaps.’”
Murray grabbed his Nikon F and two rolls of color film. As they neared the rehearsal room, he could hear music. “I said, ‘Somebody’s playing ‘Lady Madonna,’” he remembers. “And then I opened the door, and I said, ‘Oh s- - -. It’s Paul McCartney.’”
The Beatles (plus Yoko Ono) were inside, taking a break from recording the White Album. “Is this the group?” Murray asked, to which McCullin replied, “Didn’t I tell you?”
Dissatisfied with their publicity photos, the Beatles had commissioned McCullin for new pictures, and the photo session that followed is one of the most famous in Beatles lore. Known as the Mad Day Out, it captures the foursome in peak playful mode as they gallivant around London — standing in a garden of hollyhocks, goofing on top of a concrete block at the Old Street roundabout, posing on a bench outside St Pancras Coroner’s Court next to an old man who’d fallen asleep while reading the newspaper.
“They were very spontaneous,” Murray says of the band, who started recording “Hey Jude” the day after the shoot. He remembers how, with no prelude, Lennon threw himself on the ground, and the other three huddled around him, as if in mourning, a picture that gained an eerie subtext after Lennon died in 1980. “I wish I could have asked him, why did you do that?” Murray says. “It was very strange.”
A photo that McCullin took that day became the cover of Life magazine, but Tom Murray did indeed take “some nice snaps,” which made a splash when they hit the exhibition circuit in 1998, after nearly 30 years of languishing in a drawer.
On Nov. 14, Dallas Auction Gallery will auction 23 negatives (along with the copyright), a collection called “The Mad Day: Summer of ‘68.” Other items up for bid include King Edward VII’s Broadwood Grand Piano, made in 1879, and Pierre Costeau’s 1969 Rolex Submariner, a diver’s watch co-designed by his father, Jacques Cousteau.
Tom Murray went on to have a storied career shooting, among other celebrities, the Royal family, but the Beatles pictures are close to his heart. “It’s a bit like parting with 23 children,” he says. “I promise not to cry.”
