The Wedding Album

With shelves heaving under the weight of dozens of Beatles-related books, many of them compendia of photos once deemed rare, I thought I'd seen it all. Now well into the internet age, and with the abundance of free blog space available to anyone with a collection and a scanner, I'm constantly amazed at the 'new' discoveries that turn up with impressive regularity.



These photos of Magic Alex's July '68 wedding (some of which apparently emanate from an October '68 edition of Motion Picture magazine) would, only 20 years or so ago, have been the stuff of once-glimpsed-in-a-scrapbook myth. Now these, and countless other similarly dazzling finds, are common currency at the click of a mouse.

It's a bit disappointing that it might take another decade to get Mark Lewisohn's 'definitive' take on Alexis Mardas' controversial tenure as Beatles insider/employee, but we can learn something of the enigma from this fascinating account, in which writer Peter Doggett tracks down a 60-something Mardas to a bar in Athens.

(Did the marriage survive, I wonder?)