mike's sixties tales

By Catherine Jones on May 28, 09 03:09 PM

Mike McCartney tells a good anecdote - and to be fair he has plenty of them up his sleeve stretching right back to his Liverpool boyhood.
Yesterday he opened a "mini-60s" exhibition of four photographs featuring early images of the Beatles and off-beat shots of the Scaffold.
They are a "teaser" of a much bigger exhibition of his work which will go into the new Museum of Liverpool.
MIke joked that it was the smallest exhibition he'd ever launched and he should have had a tiny ribbon and a giant pair of shears to cut it.

Each of the quartet of images has an explanation by it penned by Mike and offering a little insight into his world at the time.
He told me the shots of the Scaffold, which he appeared on, were set up very carefully before he hopped in front of the camera and asked the band's roadie John "Hewo" Hewson to click the shutter.
On another picture, it was a young George Harrison who was pressed into service. The image shows a spectacle-wearing John Lennon on harmonica, big brother Paul at the piano and Mike (at that time a ladies hairdresser) walking his fingers along the top of the instrument.
I told him it looked as if any minute Lennon would stop playing, turn and say "Paul, can you tell you brother to stop p***ing around?".
In fact that's almost what happened elsewhere when Mike had been spotted being silly in public. The caption Mike has written next to the picture says: "Paul told me I had to stop as Gerry Marsden had asked him if I was soft in the head."
When the main exhibition opens at the new museum next year I think NML should let Mike loose at the, well, mic to tell his stories of life at home in Forthlin Road and on tour in the Austin 1100 with Roger McGough and John Gorman.