#les chadwick

At the end of February [probably actually September 1962], Les Chadwick [local photographer] arranged for the Beatles to meet him in the Dingle studio he shared with Peter Kaye, an even more prominent local photographer. The appointment was made for eleven in the morning, but it was three hours later when the Beatles eventually turned up, driven by Paul in the racing green Ford Classic he had bought from his saving of gig earnings. “Paul had made the effort to save up for a car,” says Chadwick, “because he was a little more down-to-earth than the others: a car to Paul was a little bit of security and a slight status symbol. And when he got it he took the others around in it. He had, or perhaps needed, just a little more stability than the other lads.” […] In different situations from those Sam Leach observed, the photographer saw a different relationship between Paul and Brian Epstein. “Paul was a bright lad—in his own way the brightest of the lot. And I don’t think he fell as easily for this vision of El Dorado that Brian was giving them glimpses of. The others were all going, ‘Yes, yes, let’s have it.’ But I got the impression he was wondering if it was all possible, if they weren’t going to come down to earth with a bad bump. Paul always seemed to me to be the one that had one foot on dry land. He never lost his grip on reality, he was never swept away by it, in the way the others would allow themselves to be picked up by it and go along with it because it was a laugh. “John would go along with anything new and different, even then. He would create situations that Paul would go along with; Paul didn’t create situations, but equally it wouldn’t matter if John lost it all. But Paul was more of a thinker; he could see the other side, and was always trying to envisage what would happen if the whole thing fell apart. In a way, it’s a shame he couldn’t just enjoy it all for what it was. But caution got the better of him.”