Paul McCartney - Many Years From Now: The Barry Miles Archive
Paul McCartney – Many Years From Now: The Barry Miles Archive is one of the largest research libraries on the Beatles in existence, designed as a writer’s reference library rather than as a fan’s collection. It was assembled to gather together and organise information on the Beatles which was used by Barry Miles to write many articles and books, the most important of which was the authorised biography - Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now. The archive includes the working drafts of this book, including early drafts with material that was later edited out.
Miles first interviewed Paul McCartney for International Times in December 1966, and this tape, along with its transcript, is the earliest recording in the archive. Some of the items included in the archive, such as the scarce Apple in-house magazines, were first acquired in the late sixties when Miles worked for the Beatles’ Apple Records as the label manager for Zapple. Over the years Miles wrote extensively about the Beatles in magazines like Crawdaddy, Oz, International Times, NME, High Times, The Observer, Q, Mojo, and many more obscure titles including American underground newspapers like the San Francisco Oracle.
The archive comprises of approximately 4,000 pages of clippings and tearsheets, plus over 500 complete magazines; almost 100 newspapers and specials published at the time of John Lennon’s death; more than 125 books; more than 30 bootleg CDs including the nine volume Beatles at BBC complete; 42 cassette interview tapes with McCartney by Miles plus 25 others including interviews with George Harrison (1967) and John Lennon (1969); over 1,800 pages in interview transcripts; more than 3,000 pages of notes, and early draft manuscripts.
A list of the collection will be added to this page shortly, in the mean time please contact the L&SS Archivist for more information. Please note that the interview tapes are not currently accessible due to preservation requirements.
