Back in the day when record sleeves had to be photographed, with limited chance to touch up on the results after the fact, certain things were kept in that would have been easily Photoshopped out of existance today.
Not even the biggest band in the world in 1969 were safe from unplanned photo bombs. On their last recorded work, Abbey Road, they had two of them.
To start with the front cover: In the background, slightly up and to the left of John Lennon’s head, you can see a middle-aged gentleman standing there, arms on his hips, looking towards the ongoing photo sesssion.
It might be a bit of a “blink and you miss him” moment, as he blends in a bit with the background, but anyone studying the cover in detail (people used to do that!) will have noticed him.
That guy was a salesman from Florida who, on that fateful day – 8 August 1969 – happened to be standing on a London street, minding his time in the midst of a European holiday, when The Beatles suddenly walked across the road in front of him, lined in perfect formation.
“They went across like a row of ducks,” Paul Cole told My Palm Beach Post. “I say to peopke, ‘You don’t realize it, but you’re talking to a person whose picture is in millions of homes throughout the world!”
But how did it happen that he was standing there on that day? Well, he didn’t want to follow his wife to a nearby museum.
“I told her, ‘I’ve seen all the museums I care to look at,'” says Cole, who was 44 at the time. He struck up a conversation with a policeman on duty and then stood there in disbelief when The Beatles walked by.
How did he find out that for a few minutes he was the “fifth” Beatle?
His wife, an organist, purchased a copy of Abbey Road so she could learn a song off it for a wedding she was playing. Cole spotted it in the house. “I did a double take and said, ‘Hey, that’s me!'”
The second random person is much more of a mystery, and can be found on the back cover. No full image exists of the lady in the blue dress who was walking by just as photographer Iain Macmillan was attempting to shoot the street marker sign, so we don’t know what she looks like. The lady in the blue dress has never come forward and identified herselv either, and we will likely never know exactly who that person was.
The back sleeve image was photographed after the road-crossing photo was finished. The band and Macmillan had agreed on using a simple, striking image of an Abbey Road street sign on the back cover of the album. The title of the album would then be very clearly shown there, as it wouldn’t be printed on the front.
Macmillan found the perfect sign at the junction of Alexandra Road. He set up his equipment and started taking photos of the sign.
This was before it was normal to take hundreds of photos “just in case” and Macmillan figured a film would be enough to properly capture the static objective. Much to his chagrin, in the middle of the shoot an oblivious woman in a blue dress walked right in front of his viewfinder. He was concerned that these kind of ‘passers-by’-accidents would reduce the amount of viable options, but as it turned out, the woman passing by would be a very happy accident.
When Macmillan reviewed his shots later that day, he was surprised by how the ‘blue dress’ photo had turned out to be the most interesting of the bunch. The photo is dynamic, lending some movement to an otherwise extremely static visual composition. The girl is also suitably blurred with the focus being on the sign. The band agreed with the photographer that this was perfect, and the image ended up being used as the album’s back sleeve photo.
We still don’t know who the lady is – and likely she never had any idea that there was a photo shoot going and where it – and her – ended up!
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