There’s a copy of this photo in some 30million homes worldwide (Image: Apple Corps)
Today marks World Beatles Day, celebrating the work of the Liverpool four-piece that released 11 smash hit albums in a frenzied six-year career.
While, due to production delays, Let It Be was the last studio album to be released by The Beatles as a functioning band, the final set of recordings by the prodigiously-talented foursome was Abbey Road.
Recorded in the balmy last summer of the 1960s, Abbey Road not only putting a cap on the band’s career – concluding with the appropriately-titled The End – it also pointed the way to a post-Beatles future, containing George Harrison’s masterpiece Something, the first Beatles No.1 not to have been credited to the Lennon-McCartney partnership.
And Abbey Road’s cover was remarkable too, featuring an iconic image that has inspired hundreds if not thousands of imitations – and spawned one or two conspiracy theories along the way.
But that cover, which has found its way into some 30 million homes around the world, contains a secret. As well as John, Paul, George and Ringo there’s one more person in that famous photo. And for many years the identity of that “fifth Beatle” remained a mystery.
Although their recording career spanned just seven years, the band left an enormous legacy (Image: C.PRESS/AFP via Getty Images)
On the day that the photo was taken, August 8, 1969, an American tourist named Paul Cole was on holiday with his wife in London. He had paused on Abbey Road to ask a police officer for directions when he spotted four “kooks” on a zebra crossing a few yards away.
“They went across like a row of ducks,” Mr Cole recalled. “They were not dressed like you’d expect in London at the time.” In fact Ringo was quite formally dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, while John had opted for an all-white ensemble. George had turned up in double-denim while Paul, who like Ringo had dressed relatively conservatively, had chosen not to wear any shoes or socks.
“A bunch of kooks, I called them,” Mr Cole recalled, “because they were rather radical-looking at that time. You didn’t walk around in London barefoot.”
The identity of this bystander was, for years, unknown (Image: Apple)
This unpremeditated choice – Paul had simply kicked off his shoes because they were a bit tight – sparked a long-running conspiracy theory. In some cultures, the dead are buried without their shoes and some fans became convinced that the entire image was meant to evoke a sort of funeral.
Ringo’s black suit, according to the theory, was evocative of the kind of thing we tend to wear to funerals in the West while John’s white garb reflects the colour of mourning in several Eastern religions. George’s more casual outfit symbolises the gravedigger, conspiracy theorists insist.
The idea has its roots in a bizarre claim that Paul had died in a car accident in November 1966 and that the remainder of the band had conspired to keep his death a secret – although they were seemingly unable to resist the temptation to sprinkle all of their post-1966 recordings with cryptic “clues” about Paul’s fate.
According to the claims, you can hear phrases such as “I buried Paul,” “Turn me on, dead man,” and “Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him” played backwards in various late-period Beatle recordings.
Abbey Road was the band’s final goodbye to fans (Image: PA)
Allegedly, a Paul lookalike named Billy Shears had been hired to replace the dead star. Fortunately Billy was also an excellent bassist, able to play the instrument left-handed despite the fact that, as the conspiracists point out, he is holding a cigarette in his right hand in the Abbey Road photo.
Billy Shears somehow also went on to pen unforgettable solo hits such as Maybe I’m Amazed, Band On The Run and Mull of Kintyre as well as dabbling in everything from symphonic music to trip-hop in a successful 56-year (and counting) career, making the conspiracy theory seem ever more ridiculous with each release.
But none of that was of any concern for Paul Coles, who told the Palm Beach Post that he had no interest in the most successful band of the rock era. “If they were on television, I’d flip to something else,” he said.
Mr Cole didn’t discover his unlikely claim to fame until years later (Image: Apple Corps)
However, once he realised he was on the cover, he appears to have been quite proud of the fact. “I say to people, ‘You don’t realise it, but you’re talking to a person whose picture is in millions of homes throughout the world,’ ” he said, adding that although he had autographed the Abbey Road cover many times, he never bothered to listen to the actual record, insisting that he preferred classical music.
It was only several years after his European holiday that Mr Cole realised his accidental brush with fame.
His wife, who was the organist in their local church, bought a copy of Abbey Road because she needed to learn to play Harrison’s ballad Something for a wedding ceremony. Mr Cole glanced at the cover and noticed the new sports jacket that he bought just before they set off for London. “I did a double-take and said, ‘Hey, that’s me!’ ” he said.