1. Where is ‘Leslo’, the Greek island the Beatles wanted to buy?
In 1967 the Beatles made plans to purchase an island in Greece where they could live and make music – but no one seems to know where it was
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Where was the Greek island the Beatles wanted? The evidence
One afternoon in September 2017 I stood on a beach on the island of Mykonos, Greece, looking out across a choppy sea. I was speaking to a watersports company to ask whether they’d be able to take me to visit a smaller nearby island called Stapodia. It sits several miles off the coast in the open sea, with no shelter from the Aegean’s strong summer winds. I was told it would cost me about 1,000 Euros to take a bumpy dinghy journey there through sea spray and waves, stay an hour and return. “It’s going to be very rough out there,” warned the woman from the company.
There are no regular ferry trips to Stapodia from Mykonos, and the company had been curious to know why I wanted to visit this uninhabited islet with no obvious tourist attractions. I muttered something about wanting to explore the local area. I didn’t tell them the real reason for my interest: my idea that in the 1960s, the Beatles may have wanted to buy it.
I’d first heard about the Beatles’ plans to buy a Greek island in 2010, when I was visiting another Greek island, Skiathos, to research a travel guide. A walking guide to Skiathos1 I’d read referred to a local rumour about how in the late 1960s the Beatles had wanted to buy an islet just of its coast called Tsougria, although “the deal supposedly fell through”. I heard a similar story from a tour guide – but no one on Skiathos I asked could tell me much more.
I had been excited to visit Skiathos, but after getting there I’d found that its natural beauty was sometimes obscured by its deserved popularity. The island had all the golden beaches, pine forests and olive groves anyone could hope for, but it sometimes felt overcrowded and homogenised. The idea of the Beatles visiting allowed me to imagine a more romantic version of the island – a past where the beaches were covered only by overhanging tree branches and not rows of sunbeds.
On my return to the UK, I learned that there was at least some truth to the story. In July 1967, the Beatles did indeed visit Greece with the intention of finding an island to buy. George Harrison recalls the trip in the 1995 TV documentary, The Beatles Anthology:
"Somebody had said 'you should invest some money', and we thought, 'well let's buy an island'. We'll just go there and drop out.' We rented a boat and we drove this boat up and down the coast from Athens, looking at islands. And we came to this island that we'd arranged to go and see."
The project is also covered by Barry Miles in his authorised autobiography of Paul McCartney, Many Years from Now. McCartney told Miles:
"The idea was to get an island and just do what you want, a sort of hippie commune where nobody'd interfere with your lifestyle. I suppose the main motivation for that would probably be no one could stop you from smoking. Drugs was probably the main reason for getting some island, and then all the other community things that were around then - 'Oh, we'll paint together. We'll do this. We'll chop wood"'.
Flourishing counterculture
In many ways, such dreams were in keeping with the spirit of the times. It was after all the summer of love, and the hippie movement was reaching its zenith. There was a flourishing counterculture in London, where many young people were rejecting traditional values to try new ways of living.
Growing their hair long, taking drugs and making increasingly ambitious records, the Beatles were at the heart of this scene, and through their music were helping to bring it to new audiences.
In June 1967, with their acclaimed new album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band topping the charts, the group were filmed by the BBC as the UK's representatives for Our World, the first ever live global satellite broadcast. Bedecked in psychedelic clothing, surrounded by flowers and balloons and accompanied by a 13-piece orchestra, the Beatles played their new song, All You Need is Love, to a worldwide audience of hundreds of millions. "Everyone was joining in – it was a fabulous time, both musically and spiritually," Ringo Starr later recalled2.
Despite this, the Beatles had become dissatisfied with the downsides of their fame. The previous year, they had decided to stop playing live after an exhausting world tour when they’d at times felt in genuine danger. The group had received a death threat before performing in Tokyo and had to hide to escape an angry mob at Manila airport – not to mention John Lennon provoking fury in the US with his comment that the group were “more popular than Jesus”. All this compounded the Beatles’ frustration at performing in huge stadiums where they could barely be heard above the crowd's screams.
The studio-based experimentation of Sgt Pepper and the vision for an island refuge were just two among various other projects in which the Beatles were exploring new directions, both as a group and individually. And just a month after the trip to Greece, a shock event would make clear that their world had changed forever. The group’s manager Brian Epstein, who had been crucial in supporting their rise to success, was found dead in his home after accidentally overdosing on prescription drugs. Over the subsequent years, the cracks already emerging in the Beatles would deepen to the point where in 1970, the four young men who had dreamed of living on an island together would be facing each other in court.
The group, of course, didn’t yet know this in late July when they visited Greece with their partners and some other close members of their inner circle. The trip included two people who had helped find the island for the Beatles – Alexis Mardas, a Greek electronics expert who had recently befriended the four and planned to work with them – and Alistair Taylor, an employee of Epstein who worked for the group as a self-described “Mr Fixit”.
In his autobiography, With the Beatles, Taylor describes the trip as "one of the most enjoyable holidays I've ever had,” where “the joking and banter never stopped". One moonlit night, he recalls, George Harrison played the Hare Krishna on his ukelele while John Lennon, he and the group’s road manager Mal Evans 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".
According to Miles’ book, the island that had been lined up for the Beatles was called Leslo, “of about 80 acres, with four idyllic beaches and four smaller habitable islands surrounding it – one for each Beatle”. After visiting, the group fell “under its spell”, writes Taylor, and set the purchase in motion. But there were significant logistical challenges, and despite receiving the necessary permission from the UK government to go ahead with the purchase, the Beatles’ plans eventually fell through.
Optimistic spirit
For me, knowing what happened next lends a poignancy to the Anthology video footage – which is accompanied by the Beatles song Baby, You’re a Rich Man. Following scenes of the group relaxing on board a white yacht, interspersed with ancient ruins, glistening water and sandy beaches, we see the Beatles' entourage holding hands and dancing in a circle on a mountainside. Then the view cuts to a shot of the sun-dappled sea and pans up to a blinding white sun. "And it came to nothing," says Ringo Starr. "We didn't buy an island, we came home".
Those hazy, happy scenes seem to convey a lost innocence – arguably not just for the Beatles but for all of us. From the viewpoint of the 21st century, the hippies’ dreams of changing the world through love and drugs may now seem as quaint as the Beatles’ vision for an island commune. But perhaps we could do with rediscovering some of that decade’s optimistic spirit. It was partly this nostalgia for a time I had never known, and partly simple curiosity, that prompted me to try and find the island that the Beatles had wanted to buy.
When I did, things quickly became very confusing. I could find no Greek island called Leslo – and what’s more, official records offered a different name for the island that I also found impossible to locate. And I realised that my initial idyllic vision of the island was only part of a more complex story – not least because Greece was at the time run by a military dictatorship. In trying to make sense of this, I’ve done more research than I ever envisaged, including visiting archives and speaking to people who were involved. I’ve found some answers, as well as more questions.
Ever since the 1960s, the Beatles have been used as a reference point to discuss broader cultural trends and anxieties. Even so, in the context of their vast influence, their long-ago passing interest in buying a Greek island may seem barely worth mentioning. It’s a story, though, that seems to strike a chord with many people. This may be because it captures these cultural icons in an unexpected situation, and in this way highlights some of the tensions and contradictions of the time. I think examining it in detail, and exploring tangents to it, can tell us something about this wider history: its culture, its politics, and how those two things sometimes overlapped.
Read more:
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Actor, architect, soldier…spy? The intriguing inner circle of Alexis Mardas
From London's summer of love to Greece’s military dictatorship
Walking on Skiathos by Victoria Sandels
Quoted in the Beatles’ book The Beatles Anthology, published in 2000