Part 3 of our butcher cover mini series, check around the site for the earlier sections.

The 1st photograph shows The Beatles facing a lady who stands with her back to the camera, her hands raised as if in surprise while The Beatles hold a succession of sausages. This was intended to represent the ‘birth’ of the Beatles, with the sausages serving as an umbilical wire. Whitaker explained : “My own thought was how on earth do you show that they have been born out of a lady the same as anyone else? An umbilical twine was 1 technique of doing it.” The centre panel of the triptych is the image these days referred to as the “butcher” photograph.

It shows the ( clearly stoned ) Beatles wearing butchers’ coats, draped with slabs of red beef, fake teeth, glass eyes and dismembered doll parts. This picture was basically titled “A Somnambulant Adventure” and Bob’s aim was to add other elements to it which would make a jarring juxtaposition between idolisation of The Beatles’ as gods of the pop world and their flesh and blood fact as normal humans, but he wasn’t able to grasp this. The image that would have been used for the right-hand panel of the triptych is one of George Harrison standing behind a seated John Lennon, hammer in hand, seemingly driving nails into John’s head. Whitaker explained this picture was intended to show that the Beatles weren’t an illusion, not something that should be worshipped, but folk as real and significant as “a piece of wood”.

A 4th picture taken at the same session, but reputedly not planned to join the triptych, is also incorporated in Whitaker’s book The Unseen Beatles. It shows John framing Ringo’s head with a card box, on one of the flaps being written “2,000,000″. “I wished to illustrate that, in a way, there had been nothing else dazzling about Ringo than anybody else on this earth. In this life he was only one of 2,000,000 members of the human species.

The idolization of fans reminded me of the tale of the worship of the golden calf.” Like the famous 1963 undressed photo of Christine Keeler taken by his recent Lewis Morley, Whitaker’s “butcher” photograph shortly passed out of his control and took on a life of its own. The Beatles themselves have been behind the utilization of the photograph in Brit trade advertisements and then on the cover of the Capitol album Yesterday and Today. The prime mover seems to have once been Paul McCartney. In his book Roar , Beatles biographer Philip Norman claims that Brian Epstein had misgivings about the picture and felt it might interrupt the band’s scrupulously managed image, which had taken a hammering in the train of the contemporary “bigger than Jesus” discussion. But according to Norman, the band overruled him.

Apparently the butcher photograph made 3 appearances in print in the United Kingdom prior to it being released in the United States on the cover of Yesterday And Today.

It was first revealed on page two of New Musical Express on three June 1966′ in an EMI ad promoting the forthcoming single. The same ad was revealed in Disc and Music Echo the following day, June four. Both these versions were in BW. Its 3rd appearance ( and its 1st in color ) was on the front page of Disc and Music Echo on eleven June 1966 under the title, “BEATLES : WHAT A CARVE-UP!”.