Never-seen-before photos of rock legend Sir Paul McCartney and his late wife Linda have been uncovered in the loft of a celebrity photographer in Chiswick .
Celebrated snapper Clive Arrowsmith of Woodstock Road, through his line of work became great friends with the couple who formed Wings after the Beatles broke up, and was overjoyed to find the photos which sent him on a trip down memory lane.
It brought back other memories including the times he used to go and stay on the floor of the squat Paul, John Lennon and George Harrison lived in Liverpool, when they were in a band called The Quarry Men.
Mr Arrowsmith told getwestlondon : “I first met Paul in 1964 in Liverpool when I was at Queensferry Art School in North Wales.
"I used to go to Liverpool as its only about 40 miles away from Queensferry, at the weekends. That’s where all, the action was!”
The exclusive set of photos hidden away for a number of years include three images taken at the end of a shoot in London for the Wings at the Speed of Sound (1976) album and during the photo session for Off the Ground in 1995.
“They really capture the seminal moments of the shoot when it all came together,” said Mr Arrowsmith.
“The fun we were all having, plus Paul and Linda’s closeness, it’s the naturalness of the pictures that is the key to their success.”
Clive’s career which started in the early seventies shooting for Harpers then Vogue, extended to taking snaps for the cover of Band on The Run for Paul McCartney, and some of the world's most beautiful women over the years.
Among his career highlights include being invited to photograph Prince Charles on his 50th birthday, as a practising Buddhist he was honoured to capture His Holiness The Dalai Lama, and is the only snapper to photograph the Pirelli Calendar two years in succession.
Other celebrities and politicians caught on his lens include Mick Jagger, Michael Caine, Tony Blair and Kate Bush, to name a few.
Taken on his Hasselblad camera, he explained that Paul asked the stylist to get some ‘fun costumes’ which judging from the photos the entire group enjoyed including Linda seen wearing a beard.
Another photo, a couples portrait, shows the closeness of the McCartney marriage, taken in 1992, alongside an unseen photograph of Paul McCartney bungee jumping.
To his amazement Clive realised that he had scanned some of the images in high definition years ago, and discovered many McCartney originals never published before.
He said: “I was just going through negatives and transparencies for my next book and came across them in a folder I’d forgotten about. It was a lovely moment, the best surprise I’ve had in a long while as you can imagine!
“Looking at them brought back a lot of happy memories. The shoots were always a lot of fun experimenting and trying things out which I am sure comes across in the pictures. You can’t fake that kind of atmosphere it just shines through the images.”
Mr Arrowsmith, who recently celebrated the release of his new book , Arrowsmith: Fashion, Beauty and Portraits , which includes some of his earlier work, hopes these new exclusive set of photos will form the foundation of his next book - Arrowsmith V2 - with many more unseen images of beautiful women and rock stars such as Mick Ronson and Jeff Beck.
It was during a celebration of the release of his book he showed the images to friend and fellow photographer Jeff Vickers, MBE Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), of Fulham , who organised for them to appear in the RPS Journal magazine, of which Clive is a member, as was Linda McCartney.
“She was a very lovely woman and we both had a passion for photography in common,” he added.
Clive is also an accomplished landscape and still life photographer, and has also shot advertising campaigns for the likes of De Beer, Revlon and GHD.
