High up above Hamburg in a spartan fourth-floor café, there's a nonstop soundtrack on the stereo of couplets so familiar they've become almost part of a surreal, global conversation that's been running for nearly 50 years:
'When I find myself in times of trouble...'
'Well, she was just 17...'
'Something in the way she moves...'
'And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.'
Sitting in the corner of the Beatlemania Yeah! Café is a petite woman with cropped grey hair, wearing a woollen black polo neck and sipping coffee. Hanging on the walls around her are the gritty portraits she took half a century ago. They're of a young, raw rock'n'roll group from Liverpool called The Beatles who, in desperation for regular gigs, came to live in her city. The woman is Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer responsible for some of the most iconic rock'n'roll images of all time.
Immortalised in the 1994 hit movie Backbeat starring Stephen Dorff, Kirchherr has always been reticent about their time together and has only ever given a handful of interviews. Now, she tells me, this is to be the last about her time with the greatest band in history. 'I've just got a bit sick of talking about it all,' she tells me. 'People only want to talk about the bloody haircuts. Some think that I was just the hairdresser who gave the Beatles their mop-top cuts. I won't be talking about it again after today.'
