There are moments that change the course of history and, with it, the collective imagination. They are often remembered in a photograph. The history of music is no exception.

Between late 1963 and early 1964, the Beatles went from provincial stages to a global phenomenon in a matter of weeks. It was already clear on October 13, 1963, when after a performance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium a torrent of screaming fans flooded the streets, blocking traffic. The press described them as “the four boys who shook the world,” and a few weeks later the Daily Mirror officially coined the term “Beatlemania!”, giving a name to a previously unthinkable form of collective hysteria.

The crescendo was swift. On December 7, the Beatles appeared on the television show Juke Box Jury, watched by 23 million viewers. Between Christmas and early January, they took the stage at the Finsbury Park Astoria with The Beatles Christmas Show, a production mixing music and comedy sketches that drew an audience far beyond the fans of the Liverpool and Hamburg clubs. In January 1964, three weeks of concerts at the Olympia in Paris marked their first real encounter with European audiences—a prelude to the American breakthrough and their consecration as global stars.

Freeze the frame: John and Ringo are 23, Paul is 21, George just 20.

Amid this whirlwind of frenzy, one of them was both protagonist and privileged observer. It was Paul who, between commutes, dressing rooms, hotel rooms, and studios, carried with him a newly purchased 35mm Pentax. From it came rare images that narrate the behind-the-scenes of a transitional moment: suspended between the adrenaline of the stage and the ordinariness of their twenties, marked by a spontaneity that only the eye of an insider could capture.

For more than fifty years, those photographs had been thought lost, swallowed up in the whirlwind of success. The negatives and contact sheets, long presumed gone, were eventually rediscovered and remastered. Today they return to view at Gagosian, London, in the exhibition Rearview Mirror: Liverpool–London–Paris, on view through October 4, 2025.

There is McCartney’s enigmatic self-portrait, reflected in the attic mirror of his then-girlfriend Jane Asher, where he would dream the melody of Yesterday. There are moments of complicity at the Palladium and Finsbury Park, the charged atmosphere of their first Parisian residency, and, above all, the nervous waits before the flight to New York: just days before America would anoint them in front of 73 million viewers on The Ed Sullivan Show. And most of all, there is the unvarnished charm of those four boys from Liverpool, able to bewitch the world—and, between the lines, the secret of why that spell has never faded.