Tom Murray’s Mad Day Out Photographing the Beatles

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Tom Murray’s Mad Day Out Photographing the Beatles
Rare photographs of the Fab Four, taken on a freewheeling day in London in 1968, are on display at Soho Contemporary Art.
By David Owen
Monday 28 05 2018
(The New Yorker 
Deep Cuts
June 4 & 11, 2018 Issue)


The BeatlesIllustration by Tom Bachtell

The British photographer Tom Murray isn’t crazy about Alexi Lubomirski’s official engagement and wedding portraits of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. In one shot, the couple are sitting on stone steps at Frogmore House and leaning in to each other. “Harry is too round-shouldered,” Murray said the other day, during a visit to New York. “He’s squishing her, and he’s so hunched over that she can’t get close enough. And she should have both hands on top of his right hand, instead of one hand down here, where you can’t see it.” There is, in fact, something disturbing about Markle’s right arm, which seems to end at her elbow. “And, when you put your hand on the bloke’s hand, you don’t press,” he continued. “It’s the same with leg models. A lot of them lie on the ground and do the shots upside down, so that the blood runs the other way and you don’t see any veins.”

Murray is seventy-four. In 1969, when he looked more like Peter Noone, of Herman’s Hermits, than he does today, he had his own brief experience photographing royals. He’d got the job he had then, at the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, with help from the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, also known as Lord Snowden, Princess Margaret’s husband, and the two of them often worked together. One day, Snowdon asked him to bring a camera to Kensington Palace. “I took some photos of him and Princess Margaret and their children, in their Aston Martin, looking back over the boot,” he said. “While I was shooting, a little old lady pulled at my shirt and asked what I was doing. It was Auntie Alice, who would be Queen Victoria’s last surviving grandchild.” Murray and Princess Margaret, whom he called M., became good friends. They went to movies together, and he took the children fishing. “One time, at Buckingham Palace, a corgi dog started biting at my ankles,” he said. “I gently pushed it off, and a voice said, ‘Who are you?’ ” The voice turned out to be Queen Elizabeth’s. “I told her what had happened, and she said, ‘Oh, don’t worry—that one is always doing that.’ ”


Photograph by Tom Murray / Courtesy Soho Contemporary Art

His other big break came on a summer day in 1968. As Murray tells it, Don McCullin—a distinguished war photographer and a Sunday Times colleague—asked Murray if he’d drive him around while he photographed a musical group. “I knew more about music than he did,” Murray recalled. “I thought I might get a few snaps, so I grabbed a Nikon and two rolls of Ektachrome.” When they arrived at the Times, Murray said, he heard someone playing ‘Lady Madonna’ on a piano. “We went in, and there were the Beatles, and I said, ‘Oh, shit.’ Don said, ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ ”


Photograph by Tom Murray / Courtesy Soho Contemporary Art

McCullin took a picture that appeared on the cover of Life two months later, and then they all went looking for interesting locations—an adventure known to Beatles scholars as the Mad Day Out. “They were recording ‘The White Album,’ and they hated their publicity photos,” Murray said. “John wanted to be photographed next to Karl Marx’s tomb, but when we got to Highgate Cemetery the gate was locked, so they stood in front of a little house nearby, and we shot them there.” Murray learned later that two young girls inside the house had shouted, “Dad! Dad! It’s the Beatles outside!” But their father hadn’t believed them, and by the time he got to the window they were leaving.

“It was a Sunday afternoon, and on Sundays in those days London was shut, literally shut,” Murray said. “If there had been mobile phones, we’d have been surrounded in thirty seconds, but that never happened. George would suggest something, and then Paul would suggest something, and we just drove around. We did cause two slight rear-end accidents, but nobody else noticed.” Murray shot the same things that McCullin shot, but from different angles—including an unforgettable scene of the Beatles sitting next to and leaning over an oldish man seated on a park bench, sound asleep.


Photograph by Tom Murray / Courtesy Soho Contemporary Art

Prints of twenty-three of Murray’s Mad Day photographs are currently on display, in two different sizes, at Soho Contemporary Art, near the corner of Bowery and Houston. (The larger ones sell for six thousand dollars; the smaller ones start at three thousand.) “That day was a gift from God,” Murray said, as he signed and numbered a print. “If I’d known who we were going to shoot, I’d have thrown up twice and taken four cameras and a hundred rolls of film.” A gallery employee carefully lifted the picture he had just signed. “I don’t want to be rude about it, but most of Don’s pictures from that day are crap,” Murray continued. “Mine are bloody marvellous, though. Gone are the days when I used to say they were O.K. They are the best.”

This article appears in the print edition of the June 4 & 11, 2018, issue, with the headline “Mad Day Out.”

Thursday, May 31–June 16

Tom Murray, The Beatles, Mad Day Out (1968). Photo courtesy of Soho Contemporary.

“Tom Murray’s the Beatles Collection, the Mad Day: Summer of ’68” at Soho Contemporary