ALLAN BROWN talks to 1960s

snapper Bob Whitaker, who

spent three years as the

Fab Four's court photographer

THERE is one pop axiom worth its weight in ink, and it's this: the

Beatles woulda bin contenders without John Lennon, but never without

Paul McCartney.

Unfashionable, but consider the facts. McCartney: cherubically

winsome, voice of a canary, and an exquisitely lachrymose way with a

middle eight. Lennon: face of a Northern club comic, voice of a buzzsaw,

unpleasant on principle to people in wheelchairs.

But still there persists the tendency to shunt Macca into the shade

and lionise Lennon, not least in Bob Whitaker's otherwise excellent

collection of Fab Four snapshots The Unseen Beatles. Hired to take Brian

Epstein's photograph in Melbourne on the Beatles' Australian tour of

1964, Whitaker was to spend three years as the band's court

photographer.

Following the Fabs on tour through America, Germany, and Japan,

Whitaker caught the band at their most sexily dissolute as they sloughed

the skin of Beatlemania and really allowed their unrivalled fame,

unlimited wealth, and unimpeachable godliness to kick in. The pictures

in The Unseen Beatles chronicle the band's doings with an ironic eye.

''I don't think I was ever very interested in the Beatles as musical

performers'', says Whitaker today. ''It certainly wasn't a dream come

true when Epstein gave me the job; to my younger, more arrogant self it

just seemed like a natural progression. It was their power that was

fascinating; no young person had ever experienced what they were

experiencing. Their power was awesome.''

When the Beatles quit touring in 1966, Whitaker established his own

studio in London before taking his tripod to Vietnam for Time magazine.

In 1972, he abandoned photography and bought a farm in England, where he

toiled until 1987 and a serious car smash that left him plenty of time

to catalogue the ''thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands'' of prints

and negatives that had lain untouched in his barn for 20 years.

What he found was a pictorial diary of The Longest Cocktail Party:

shots of Cream, The Who, Oz magazine, the love-ins, the be-ins, Salvador

Dali, the Six-Day War, Biafra; you name it, Whitaker was there. But it's

the Beatles he inevitably finds himself coming back to.

''I'm still going through boxes, finding pictures I don't remember

even having taken. It's exhilarating, but also horribly sad; it's

painful to think of the way we disappeared from each other's lives. When

I first opened those boxes I thought I'd probably have to spend the next

five years dealing with my Beatle memories. Now I think I'll be dealing

with them forever.''

* The Unseen Beatles, by Bob Whitaker, is published by Conran Octopus,

at #18.99 (pp 162).