Hyde Park in Color

Words cannot express how excited I am about these photos and this post.   If you are a friend of the blog on facebook, then you will know that I told you these were coming.   Here they are 1967 Hyde Park photos in color and there is a very interesting story behind them.

A fan named Konrad contacted me a couple weeks ago asking me about the last photo, which I had posted quite a while ago.  As usual with me and Beatles photos, I could not recall where I exactly had found this photo.   Well....come to find out Konrad owns the copyright to this photo and the others you see here.   Let me share with all of you what he shared with me.  

In 1967, Konrad had a classmate who visited London.   While he was in London he happened upon the Beatles in Hyde Park doing a photo shoot (Many of which were taken by Mal Evans and appeared in the Aug and Sept 1967 issues of Beatle Book Monthly.)  This friend was not a Beatles fan, but took a few photos of the Beatles because of their fancy clothing. When he returned home to Germany, he showed the colored photos to Konrad.   Being a Beatles fan, Konrad offered to buy them (and the rights to them) off his pal. 

He saw a chance to have them in the German fan magazine, Bravo.  They were interested in the photos and the story.  Although he told the magazine that he personally did not meet the Beatles, they wrote the article as if he did (this was a teen fan magazine in the 1960's after all.  It does make for a better story than the truth).  From there German fans saw the photos and started contacting him for copies and to be pen pals.  And like so many other fan-taken photos of the time, he began trading the selling the photos with people from around the world.   

He does question if this classmate of his really did take these photos himself as he claimed; however it is a fact that he was in London during this time.   And he had no interest in the Beatles or pop music, so why would he lie about it?  Regardless of all that, I do know that have no seen colored photos from this photo shoot in Hyde Park (besides the one of John) and they do look like "outtakes" from the official photos. 

Konrad graciously and kindly has allowed me to publish these on the blog.  I can't thank him enough.