Saturday 24 March 2012

The Carol-Anne Martin Photostory

There seems to have been a lot of confusion and curiosity going around among some Whofans relating to a selection of John Entwistle photographs featuring a little known young lady.

As much as it would amuse John that I'm defending his honour I do perhaps owe him a little for somewhat defending mine in the past, so let's clear this situation up. ...admittedly I'm doing this more for the lovely Alison Entwistle than John.

All of the following images were taken on Thursday 2nd March 1967 and star Who fan Carol-Anne Martin spending a day with her idol, John Entwistle, and accompanying him to the Marquee Club that evening where The Who's performance would be filmed for Beat Club.
I don't know whether the girl was a true Who fan who had won the day in a competition, whether it was a publicity excercise or whether it was a photo op set up with a model. What I am certain about is that three months after these photos were taken John married his childhood sweetheart Alison Wise whom he had met and school and had been dating steadily since 1962. Alison had been dutifully attending John's gigs since he was in The Detours, so she wasn't exactly going to miss any girls hanging around him at gigs in London several years later. These photos were posed for fan magazines, and John wasn't stupidly going to suggest a secret girlfriend for the photo shoot either (that honour goes to Paul McCartney, maybe I'll explain about that another time).It's worth noting that the carpet and wallpaper in the bedroom photos match those in the picture of Carol-Anne sat on her sofa in front of a wall full of Who pictures. Whether those who read magazines in the 60s actually beileved that a photographer could sneak a girl into John's bedroom to wake him up without him noticing is unknown. ;)The following two photos were taken by Ray Stevenson who covered the Beat Club recording. All of the other images were taken by David Magnus.








If anyone else has any additional information or more photos from the shoot, please contact me and I'll update this to share with everyone else out there. All images and footage remains the property of their original creators and are reproduced here for educational puroses (setting a bit of pop history straight).