The Beatles' magical misery tour

As the Beatles’ gravy train began to derail, one man captured the madness. Robert Whitaker’s photographs, many unseen, show the beginning of the end of their stage career.

The speed of the Beatles’ evolution would have stunned Charles Darwin himself. In 1964 they were singing I Want to Hold Your Hand, and waving from the revolving stage of that cosy telly institution, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Just two years later they were messing with LSD and tape loops and writing songs about death, taxes and meditation. When the photographer Robert Whitaker joined them on their 1966 world tour, the band effectively had a split personality. Back in London they had been recording the tracks for Revolver, their most experimental LP so far – everything from the string-laden lament of Eleanor Rigby to the psychedelic whirlwind of Tomorrow Never Knows, with John Lennon tempting listeners to “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”. But the record wouldn’t be released until later that summer, and on stage in Germany and the Far East they gave the screaming fans what they wanted, reverting to tidy suited moptops and playing old chestnuts like I Feel Fine, I Wanna Be Your Man, and even Rock and Roll Music – a 1957 hit for their hero Chuck Berry.

Thanks to Whitaker’s camera, we have an access-all-areas pass to the Beatles at the midpoint of their career: three-and-a-bit years after their first No 1 record, and three-and-a-bit years before their partnership had disintegrated. Here are four young friends – their ages ranging from 23 (George Harrison) to pushing 26 (Ringo Starr) – reacting to an extraordinary adventure: dressing up, fooling around, flirting, rehearsing and, of course, performing as the greatest pop group in the world. “It was all first-class flights, fantastic hotels, being greeted by thousands of people screaming, being driven around in fast cars… Wow! What a buzz,” remembers 68-year-old Whitaker today. “And wherever you went with the Beatles, there’d be some sort of press conference, with people asking the most inane questions.” One inquisitive reporter in Hamburg asked the band: “What do you dream of when you sleep?” Other questions here were “What do you think about your music?” and “How many girls have you had here in Hamburg?” (Lennon snapped back: “What do you mean, ‘had’?”)

When they got to Japan, purists objected to the fact that the Beatles would be playing Tokyo’s Budokan, a venue specifically designed for Japanese martial arts. There were death threats and the authorities stepped up security, which made the band virtual prisoners in their suite at the Tokyo Hilton. (The list of artists who have played this “sacred” hall since then, without so much as a karate chop, includes Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Kiss and Beyoncé.)

At one point, the ever-restless John Lennon escaped from the hotel for a spot of sightseeing. “He snuck out using my name,” says Whitaker, “on the basis, I think, that all white people probably looked the same to the Japanese. He got away with it for a while, but then somebody recognised him and he was dragged back to the hotel.”

Whitaker’s involvement with the band had already been controversial. In March that year, he had photographed their most notorious album cover. Now known as the “butcher” cover, shot for the American release Yesterday and Today, it showed the Fab Four in a melee of raw meat and dismembered dolls. Myths have grown about its symbolism – that it was a statement about Vietnam, or a protest at the Americans’ “butchering” of the band’s oeuvre to provide the diverse songs for the album – but now the photographer puts the record straight: “It was inspired by a dream I had about the Beatles being ripped to shreds by all these young girls when they came out of a stadium.”

Something just as grisly could easily have happened in the Philippines. After the Beatles landed in Manila on July 3, 1966, the band members were separated from their confused entourage and whisked off to a yacht owned by a Filipino big shot, Don Manolo Elizalde. And at some point, it seems the Beatles’ retinue received an invitation for the band to join Imelda Marcos for a morning reception at Malacanang Palace. The request may have been politely declined, and the Beatles weren’t even informed of it, but the shoe-collecting first lady was certainly expecting them. “They weren’t allowed off that yacht until about 4am, so do you really think they’re going to rush off to have breakfast with Mrs Marcos?” says Whitaker, doing an impression of a big Beatle yawn. In Manila the band rehearsed glumly in cramped, stifling conditions, and then played for tens of thousands of fans with sweat trickling down their faces.

“It was very, very humid, and they were nothing like as happy as they were in Japan. But they performed brilliantly there.”

When they awoke on July 5, they discovered the Filipino media had made the group public enemies No 1, 2, 3 and 4 for “snubbing” Imelda Marcos. Getting out became the priority. “At the airport we were all jostled, shoved, pushed, and it was ‘Carry your own bags – there’s no porters for you! ’ It upset the Beatles a great deal,” recalls Whitaker. “When we were on the plane waiting to take off, there was complete silence in the first-class cabin. We didn’t know whether we were all going to be dragged off and slung into prison. When the engines started up and we were finally in the air, there was such elation among all of us to get out of that f***-hole.”

After Manila, Whitaker went on to work on the legendary Oz magazine, take hundreds of pictures of the band Cream and Salvador Dali, and photograph Mick Jagger in Australia, on the set of the 1970 film Ned Kelly.

The Beatles would go on to perform a string of American dates that year, but called a halt to touring after that – and the Filipino fracas was more than likely a factor in the decision. As their friend and personal assistant Neil Aspinall said later, “It might have been one of the last nails in the touring coffin.” You could even speculate that without Imelda Marcos, the band might not have retreated quite so hermetically into the recording studio – whence they emerged with the masterpiece that was Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.