It was thirty years ago today

In 1963, when Beatlemania was just beginning to explode in Britain, photographer Terence Spencer returned from working on news stories in Africa to find his daughter - then thirteen - begging him to do a feature on "the Fab Four". The editors of "Life" magazine were at first unimpressed by the idea; in America the group was still practically unknown. But after the Beatles had agreed to let Spencer travel with them for four months, in January 1964 "Life" did indeed publish a feature, just before the band launched into its historic and triumphant tour of the States. Thirty years later, 5,000 negatives of Spencer's Beatles photographs - virtually all of them unpublished - resurfaced and were sold at auction by Sotheby's of London. This book contains the cream of these lost pictures, presenting a unique portrait of the Beatles at a time when they were on the brink of international stardom - still anonymous enough to allow Spencer intimate access, yet already famous enough to need protection from their multitude of fans. The fruits of that intimacy, published here for the first time, are a collection of photographs that portray, with unprecedented candour, the Beatles backstage, on stage, behind the scenes, in front of the mirror, before the show and after the party. These pictures reveal the Beatles as you've never seem them - and nobody has ever seen them. Here they all are, as they really were thirty years ago today.