The Beatles ─ The Days of Their Life

The most famous pop band in the world, even today The Beatles hold center stage. Anyone who lived through the 1960s remembers them and the digital remastering of their output has ensured that younger generations know them too. How could they not? The songs will live forever and are regularly reused in film or TV scores, on advertisements, and on radio channels everywhere.

With such coverage and interest, how can there be anything new to say about the band? The Beatles: The Days of Their Lives manages to do so thanks to the remarkable collection of photographs housed in Mirropix, the library of the Daily Mirror, Britain's premier popular daily. With so much interest in the band, photographers were always looking to cover not just the major events that all the media attended, but smaller more intimate moments. And then, of course there were the paparazzi: the Beatles were perfect targets for this new breed of photographer who didn't ask for permission to take their photos and followed George, Paul, John, and Ringo wherever they went.

Mirropix has a sensational collection of material taken to feed an insatiable desire to see the band, its families, hangers on and what they did. Record launches, publicity events, holidays, flights in and out of the country. TV broadcasts, film work, births, deaths, and marriages: everything was photographed. With this sort of coverage, unsurprisingly much material was not published and it is this treasure trove that is exploited in The Beatles: The Days of Their Lives.

Richard Havers spent twenty years working in the airline industry before deciding to pursue his passion for writing. His books include Bill Wyman's Blues Odyssey, Rolling with the Stones, co-written with Bill Wyman; Sinatra, an illustrated biography of Frank Sinatra. He has co-authored My Take, Gary Barlow's autobiography & The Brooklyn Boy, Tony Visconti's.