10. ‘Be at Leso’: the strange world of Beatles mythology
We often read too much into apparent clues that don’t really exist. On the other hand, small details sometimes point towards surprising truths.
Wherever the island was in Greece that the Beatles wanted to buy, it seems to me increasingly unlikely that it was called ‘Leslo’ – not least because there appears to be no island with that name.
So how did the name come to be linked to it? One possibility comes through association with a bizarre urban legend about the Beatles that spread across the US in 1969: the idea that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced with a lookalike. The rumour was given oxygen by the Detroit radio station WKNR-FM on 12 October 1969, which drew attention to some macabre observations. When the track ‘Revolution 9’ from the Beatles’ ‘white album’ is played backwards, a caller pointed out, it sounds as if John Lennon is saying: “Turn me on, dead man”. What’s more, at the end of the group’s 1967 song Strawberry Fields forever, it sounds like Lennon is saying “I buried Paul”.
The broadcast brought into the open rumours that had been circulating on US university campuses, suggesting that Paul McCartney had died in a car accident in November 1966 – and they quickly spread further. Two days later, an article in the student newspaper the Michigan Daily claimed Paul had been replaced by “an orphan from Edinburgh named William Campbell”:
“Minor plastic surgery was required to complete the image, and Campbell’s mustache distracted everyone who knew the original McCartney from the impostor’s real identity. The other Beatles subsequently grew mustaches to integrate the ‘new’ Paul into the group.”
These ideas were discussed further on WKNR, as well as student newspapers, and later in more mainstream media1. Even when LIFE magazine tracked McCartney down and published photographs of the Beatle at his farm in Scotland, it didn’t end the speculation. Due to an advertisement on the reverse side, it was claimed that the magazine’s cover showed McCartney being impaled by a car when a light was shone through it.
Many supposed clues were located in the artwork of the Beatles’ albums – particularly Abbey Road, Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Peter Blake’s famous collage scene on the cover of Sgt. Pepper was said to represent a funeral, with the arrangement of yellow flowers portraying Paul’s bass guitar or alternatively, spelling ‘PAUL?’. The author R. Gary Patterson2 points out that if a mirror is placed horizontally over the bass drum skin in the centre of the scene, the phrase ‘LONELY HEARTS’ becomes ‘I ONE IX HE ◊ DIE’ – said to refer to Paul’s supposed death on 9 November, with the diamond pointing both up to him and down to the ‘grave’.
Some strands of the myth made reference to a Greek island. Patterson also refers to speculation about the letter ‘O’ to the right of the red flowers spelling ‘BEATLES’ on the album cover:
“To those onlookers with a more active imagination, the blood-red hyacinth message read ‘Be at Leso’. The obscure ‘o’ helped form the name of a certain Greek island, rumoured to have been purchased by the Beatles themselves for the final resting place of Paul McCartney.”
An island also appears in the first written record of the ‘Paul is dead’ rumour, in the Drake Times-Delphic on 17 September 1969, which says:
“One of the wilder rumours has it that if a certain English phone number is called at exactly five a.m. any Wednesday (London time) and the caller tells whoever answers what there is to the mystery and his particulars, he wins the Beatles’ paradise island in the Mediterranean. Amazing.”
Beatles’ transformation
So according to a sub-branch of the ‘Paul is dead’ myth, ‘Leso’ was a Greek island where the real Paul had been laid to rest. It’s possible that in some way this idea led to the similar name ‘Leslo’ becoming linked to the actual island the Beatles had wanted. It goes without saying that these ideas – and those in general regarding Paul’s supposed death – are hardly convincing. One suspects that many of those who promoted them did so with their tongue in cheek. Nonetheless, there may well be a reason why they appealed to the imagination at that time.
The Sgt. Pepper album epitomised a transformation of the Beatles that perplexed some of the public. Its cover underlined this change, displaying waxworks of the younger Beatles wearing suits alongside the group in their more recent psychedelic incarnation, with moustaches and neon military-style uniforms. The Beatles had become increasingly dissatisfied with their earlier public personas and found live touring musically unfulfilling. The exact same metaphor had been used by John Lennon when he said: “We could send out four waxwork dummies of ourselves and that would satisfy the crowds. Beatles concerts are nothing to do with music any more. They’re just bloody tribal rites.”3
The Beatles’ former press officer Tony Barrow wrote that after the group’s final performance of their 1966 US tour at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, George Harrison said to him: “That’s it then. I’m not a Beatle any more.”4
“He didn’t intend to imply that he was leaving the group,” explains Barrow, “just that he and the other three could now turn their backs on all the hassles of Beatlemania and concentrate on some serious music-making in the recording studios.” The Beatles’ producer George Martin wrote of the same period: “The boys were tiring of their prison of fame, and each wanted his own identity back.”
Much of the public still associated the Beatles with the clean-cut image that had been carefully overseen by their manager Brian Epstein from the early sixties. From 1966 onwards, though, the Beatles “took control of their own destiny”, writes Ian MacDonald5, “breaking Epstein’s benign hold over them”, and becoming increasingly outspoken and experimental. Candlestick Park, in August 1966, was the group’s last formal public concert. So though November that year was not when Paul McCartney died in a car accident, it was soon after the time that the Beatles’ former public selves disappeared – never again to return.
It perhaps isn’t a coincidence then that the Sgt. Pepper album cover become a focus of rumour and speculation. As Patterson argues, people needed an explanation for an actual change that the group had undergone:
“The American public, it seemed, refused to allow change in their heroes. If there really was change in the Beatles, there had to be a reason for it. After the release of the Beatles’ albums from 1967 to 1969, those adoring fans of the past became the inquisitors of the present. A scapegoat was demanded, and when the ‘Paul is dead’ rumours surfaced in October 1969, those fans, filled with insecurity, were only too eager to search for the clues that provided the answer to this strange change in the Beatles’ behaviour.”
It may not be coincidental, either, that the idea of the Greek island became part of these rumours: it represented the Beatle’s evolving ambitions and motivations. Whether to escape the pressure of Beatlemania or simply to explore new horizons, they were already being drawn to remote or far-flung places. In June 1966, McCartney had bought High Park Farm in Scotland; and earlier in 1967, John Lennon – a driving force behind the Greek island plans – had purchased the island of Dorinish in Ireland. Meanwhile, after finishing touring in 1966 George Harrison had visited India, later saying “it was the first feeling I’d ever had of being liberated from being a Beatle or a number”. The group were also evoking fantasy worlds in their music, such as the Magical Mystery Tour or Strawberry Fields – a place where “nothing is real”, with “nothing to get hung about”.
The Beatles’ dream of buying a Greek island – where they could “drop out” to take drugs and record music – seems to crystallise their aspirations to transcend their previous personas. It also taps into a universal desire to escape into a pastoral realm where life is simpler and easier. This tendency is often associated in particular with islands – such as that in Shakespeare’s Tempest, full of “sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not”. A comparable sense of ease is conveyed in Alistair Taylor’s recollection of a moonlit night on the Beatles’ visit to Greece when George Harrison played the Hare Krishna on his ukelele as others sang along: "Beatlemania seemed to have finally been left far behind and we were totally at peace with the world as we sat there with legs crossed in the lotus position"6.
Mysteries remain
The feeling that “nothing is real” also sometimes appears to apply more literally to the group’s Greek plans and their more puzzling aspects. If the island was not called either ‘Leslo’ or ‘Aegos in Konstadinos’, for example, then why has it come to be referred to with these names: not just in the farther reaches of the internet, but in respected history books and official records?
There is also the apparent contradiction that the band who had come to represent the hippie movement, were campaigning for the legalisation of cannabis and had just had a number one hit with the song ‘All you Need is Love’, were visiting a country run by a military dictatorship. Indeed, not just visiting, but considering buying property there, and – according to one report – also being entertained by its tourism organisation. In addition, a powerful sense of mystery surrounds the central figure in this story: someone known as ‘Magic Alex’ who spoke of his high-level connections in Greece – sometimes said to include a father in the secret police – and also reportedly claimed to know people as Prince Philip. Sometimes the reality of the Beatles’ Greece plans seems barely less surreal than some of the rumours about the group that circulated.
As the ‘Paul is dead’ saga shows, the mind’s desire to find patterns and stories – the more exciting, the better – can lead us astray. Rather than “I buried Paul”, for example, what Lennon was actually saying in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was, he later said, “Cranberry sauce”. Similarly, many stories about the Beatles’ supposed Greek island paradise appear to be wide of the mark. The island wasn’t called Leso, or Leslo. It wasn’t intended a final resting place for the real Paul McCartney. And you couldn’t win it by calling a special phone number.
On the other hand, not infrequently there actually is a more complex reality beneath surface appearances. And it often is the small clues – the slips of the tongue, the curious coincidences or the things that don’t quite make sense – that first point us towards this. On the topic of the Beatles’ Greek island plans, there remain legitimate unanswered questions. And just as outlandish speculation is often pierced by a more prosaic reality, sometimes the truth can surprise us. We won’t know which is the case here until we find out what actually happened.
As described in Andru J Reeve’s book, Turn me on, Dead Man (2004)
In his book on this subject, The Walrus was Paul (1996)
Philip Norman (2008) John Lennon: The Life
Tony Barrow (2005) John, Paul, George Ringo & Me: The Real Beatles Story
Ian McDonald (1994) Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties
Alistair Taylor (2003) With the Beatles
Beatlles writer avidly reading this. Excellent research, fills a hole that others don't even seem to realise is a hole.
As to this observation: "If the island was not called either ‘Leslo’ or ‘Aegos in Konstadinos’, for example, then why has it come to be referred to with these names: not just in the farther reaches of the internet, but in respected history books and official records?"
Yeah, welcome to the world of ""respected" Beatles research,, where supposed authorities parrot things that don't actually make sense without seeming to realise they don't make sense. It's enough to make me tear my hair out sometimes... the way the standard narrative doesn't actually hold together and the world of Beatles studies collective pretends it does.
At any rate, I'll continue reading here....