This is possibly the strangest Beatles-related story I’ve ever read, cos it contains a theory I’ve somehow never heard of until now… namely that Paul McCartney wasn’t present for the Sgt Pepper album cover photoshoot and was added in later, and that someone stood in for him on the back cover in which he is noticeably not facing the camera.
What?
The really odd thing is that the Graun is telling this story—which is actually about an interesting bit of memorabilia, a press pack for the never released Sessions collection, going to auction—as if the mystery were only being solved now rather than… decades ago. Behold, if you will, the inner gatefold picture from Sgt Pepper as it appeared in 1967 (picture ganked from Discogs):
So, if Macca wasn’t there for the album photoshoot… who’s this in between John and George? Did they secretly arrange another photoshoot that he did turn up to for some reason (given that pretty much every day of the Fabs’ activity is on record somewhere, it’d have to have been secret or we’d have known long ago)? Did they make unusually sure that his apparent stand-in for the back looked exactly like him from the front too? If he wasn’t at the photoshoot but they had a perfect indistinguishable stand-in for the gatefold photo, why not just use him on the cover photo rather than paste the real one in later?
And if it’s been a mystery since then about whether or not Paul was present, why does Mark Lewisohn’s book about the Fabs’ recording sessions (published in 1987 and which I’ve had since about 1991 or 92) have so many outtakes from the photoshoot in which Paul is, frankly, right there? And why does the Graun article acknowledge there’s other photos of him proving Paul was there when they’re trying to sell this story as finally solving the mystery? None of this makes sense…
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