The Beatles' moptop hairstyle remains for many their most recognisable feature as a band, but it might surprise some to hear that it wasn't John, Paul, George or Ringo who first came up with the style, but instead the girlfriend of their ill-fated fifth member, Stuart Sutcliffe, the German photographer Astrid Kirchherr.
Kirchherr, who was best-known for taking the black and white photographs for A Long Day's Night in 1964, as well as several seminal images of the band 'before they were famous', passed away this month at the age of 81.
Born on 20 May 1938 in Hamburg, she was the daughter of a salesman for the Ford Motor Company, Emil Kirchherr, and a Swedish mother, Nielsa (nee Bergmann). Growing up during the Second World War (She was evacuated to a town on the Baltic Sea during the bombing) and coming of age during the period shortly after Germany's defeat, she was part of a group who took inspiration from Paris's existentialists, modelling herself on French singer Juliette Gréco (her choice of black leather was another influence she bequeathed on the Beatles), and distancing herself from the crimes of the generation that came before. Indeed, of John Lennon's impressions of Hitler at German clubs, she said: 'We thought it was great. We were horrified by what our parents’ generation had done.'
She met the Beatles when she was a 22-year-old art school graduate after seeing them perform at the Kaiserkeller in Hamburg’s red light district, and despite attending with her then-boyfriend Klaus Voormann, was instantly attracted to band-member Stuart Sutcliffe. She asked the band if they would accompany her for a photoshoot at a fairground, capturing them posing by the machinery. As Beatles biographer Mark Lewisohn has said, this was 'the definitive image of the group before they attained fame.'
After her and Sutcliffe became a couple, she inspired him to change his hair, modelling it on Marlon Brando's style in 1953's Julius Caesar, and became an unofficial photographer for the band. Her picture of them became the cover of their first single, Love Me Do. Tragically, Sutcliffe died aged just 21 after complaining of suffering from headaches, in April 1962, before the Beatles found fame.
Kirchherr would continue to work for the Beatles throughout the 1960s, photographing them during A Hard Day's Night in 1964, but stopped being a photographer in the 1970s, switching to interior design instead. She was married twice, first in 1967 to a Liverpool musician, the drummer Gibson Kemp, and second to a German businessman.
