The story behind… With The Beatles album cover

Our black Zip-up Hoodie dedicated to The Beatles is based upon the cover of With The Beatles, the second album of the Fab Four, published in 1964. The music of the album was very similar to the music of Please Please Me; The Beatles were still evolutioning as a band. But the story behind this cover is quite interesting…

The picture cover of their debut LP, Please Please Me (1963) featured a photo of four happy young folks, neatly dressed in suits. For their second LP, The Beatles wanted to try something else. They had not intervened over that first cover but, for their new record, they preferred to show a more serious, mature look. They loved the black and white photos that Astrid Kirchnerr took them when they were English teddy rockers lost in Hamburg, wearing leather jackets and using Elvis’ hairstyle. So they spoke with Robert Freeman, the photographer of the band from 1963 to 1966, gave him a couple of those Hamburg photos, and, on 22 August 1963, they went to shoot a photo session in the Palace Court Hotel, in the city of Bournemouth, England. As Paul McCartney remembers, “Freeman arranged us in a hotel corridor: it was very un-studio-like. The corridor was very dark, and there was a window at the end, and by using this heavy source of natural light coming from the right, he got that very moody picture which most people think he must have worked at forever and ever. But it was only an hour. He sat down, took a couple of rolls, and that was it.”
The final photo was nice, but not “commercial” enough. In fact, the company tried to pull the cover because The Beatles were not smiling, and it was only after George Martin intervened that the photo was accepted. We can say that this was their first important artistic decision; none of them would have dreamed at that time that only 3 three later they would spend thousands of pounds in the cover of Sgt. Pepper and become unique “owners” of their music and image.