Astrid Kirchherr and my beloved Beatles

Astrid Kirchherr was born in Hamburg in 1938, daughter of a manager in the German branch of the Ford Motor Company and an independently wealthy mother. She spent WW2 ev­ac­uated to the Baltic coast and didn't return to Hamburg until later. In her teens she trained as a photo­grapher.

Thank you to The Guardian. Kirchherr, Klaus Voormann and Jurgen Vollmer were friends who had all attended the Meisterschule für Mode, Textil and Grafik in Ham­burg, and shared the same ideas about Europe’s existential move­ment, fashion, culture and music. In 1960 Voormann, Astrid's boy­friend, wandered around Hamburg and heard music coming from the Kais­er­kel­l­er Club. He entered and saw The Beatles perform: Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Sutcliffe and Best.

L-R: John Lennon, George Harrison, Pete Best, Paul McCartney, Stuart Sutcliffe.

Kais­er­kel­l­er Club Hamburg, Aug 1960.

Photograph by Astrid Kirchherr

The Beatles at the Hamburg fairground, 1960

Photograph by Astrid Kirchherr

Voormann asked Kirchherr and Vollmer to listen to this new music, and Kirchherr soon decided that she wanted to be as close to the Beatles as she could. The trio of friends had never heard Rock n' Roll before, so they visited the Kaiser­keller Club almost every night, arriving at 9 o'clock and sitting in front of the stage.

In 1960, the photographer convinced the the band to accompany her to a nearby fairground where the first, now-iconic photos of the then-quintet were taken. The Beatles at that stage included Stuart Sutcliffe (bass guitar) and Pete Best (drums). And the photos are priceless.

She went out with Sutcliffe and cut his hair into the moptop style that came to represent the early Beatles, a style that she loved. After Sutcliffe's haircut, George Harrison asked her to do the same when she was visiting Liverpool.  Lennon and McCartney had their hair cut in the same style while they were in Paris, by Kirchherr's friend Vollmer who was living there. Because she took the first photos of the band in Hamburg in 1960, the clothes and the hair, Astrid was credited with helping develop their visual style.

Sutcliffe was fascinated by the German trio, especially Kirchherr, and thought they looked like real Bohemians. Sutcliffe managed to meet them eventually, and learned that all three had attended the Meisterschule, which was the same type of art college that Lennon and Sutcliffe had attended in Liverpool. Kirchherr and Sutcliffe got engaged in Nov 1960. They went to Liv­erpool in mid 1961, as Kirchherr wanted to meet Sutcliffe's family and to see Liverpool before their marriage. Everybody was expecting a strange beatnik artist from Ham­burg, but Kirchherr turned up at the Sutcliffe's house in Liv­er­pool, bearing a single long-stemmed orchid in her hand as a present and dressed in a round-necked cashmere sweater and tailored skirt.

In 1962, Sutcliffe collapsed in the middle of an art class in Hamburg. He was suffering from intense headaches, and Kirchherr's mother had local doctors examine the British lad, although they were unable to determine the cause of the pain. While living at the Kirchherrs' house in Hamburg, his condition deteriorated. In April 1962, Mrs Kirchherr phoned her daughter at work and told her that Sutcliffe had been brought back to the house, and an ambulance was called. Kirchherr rushed home and rode with Sutcliffe in the ambulance, but he tragically died of a brain haemorrhage aged 21, alongside her in an ambulance.

3 days later Astrid Kirchherr met Lennon, McCartney & Best at the Hamburg airport and told them Sutcliffe had died. Harrison and manager Brian Epstein arrived by plane with Sutcliffe's mother, who had been notified by telegram. Har­rison and Lennon supported the distraught fiancée.

Astrid remained friends with the Beatles, so she happily went on holiday with them in Paris in 1963, just after their first UK #1 single. Then she took more noted photographs of the band behind the scenes of their films especially A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and later photographed George Harrison for his solo album, Wonderwall Music.

In 1967, she married Liverpool drummer Gibson Kemp, who also had a Beatles connection: he replaced Ringo Starr in Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. The marriage ended in divorce after 7 years. She then worked as an interior designer, and then for a music publishing firm, getting married for a second time to a German businessman.

Kirchherr worked as an advis­or in the biopic Backbeat in 1994, a film that portrayed her relationship with Sutcl­iffe and the Beatles during their early days in Hamburg. Then she ret­ur­n­ed to working as an interior designer, and also owned the K&K Photog­raphy shop in Hamburg where they sold custom vintage prints, books and artwork.

Astrid Kirchherr with Ringo Starr and John Lenon on a train 

during the filming of “A Hard Day’s Night”, 1964

Photo credit: LA Times

In 2010 a selection of her im­ages went on display in Liverpool and then were released in the book Astrid Kirchherr, A Retrospective. Since Astrid Kirchherr was best known to us as the first profess­ional photogr­apher to cover the Beatles in Hamburg, the book inc­luded her other photographs as well; this was to place Kirchherr's photography in a wider context.

She died in 2020 aged 81, and appropriately it was the Beatles’ historian Mark Lewisohn who wrote her obituary.