Beatles Abbey Road crossing: On the 50th anniversary of the photo, here are the 'hidden messages' on the famous album cover

On the morning of August 8 1969, The Beatles gathered by a zebra crossing in north west London.

They were there to take the photo which would become the cover for their upcoming album. They only had a few minutes to get the shot — police were holding up traffic to keep the road clear — so, with the photographer perched atop a stepladder in the middle of the road, the band began to cross back and forth.

There was only time for six shots, and five of them were bad, with the weary, uninterested musicians out of step with each other. One of them, though, was perfect.

It was this shot that would become one of the defining images of the world’s most famous band. It fronted The Beatles’ Abbey Road album, their 11th studio effort and the last collection of songs they’d ever record.

In the half-century since its release, the image has been endlessly aped by fans visiting the now-Grade II listed zebra crossing. There’s even a live webcam stream of people trying to recreate it.

But aside from snap-happy fans causing traffic hazards, a rather more peculiar phenomenon has been stoked by the album cover: the ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy.

The alleged story goes like this: in November 1966, Paul McCartney crashed and died while driving along the M1. Not wanting to derail the success of the world’s most popular band, the powers that be quickly sourced a lookalike replacement and carried on as if nothing had ever happened.

When Abbey Road was released in September 1969, a group of students in the US began to pick up on cryptic clues on the album cover, which supposedly hinted at McCartney’s demise. The rumours spread from campus to campus, later infiltrating the mainstream media.

From the off, the conspiracy has been debunked — with McCartney himself the chief denier. “It’s all bloody rubbish,” he told Life magazine in an interview given later that year about the theory. He’s even poked fun at it through his solo work, with a 1993 album called Paul Is Live, complete with an album cover taken on that very same zebra crossing.

Even so, the Paul is Dead conspiracy retains a sense of intrigue to this day, with new generations of fans latching onto the far-fetched theory. Here, we run through all the supposedly hidden messages on the Abbey Road album cover — from the almost plausible to the downright ridiculous.

One of the most enduring conspiracies is that the band are walking across the road as if they were a funeral procession. John Lennon, leading the way and dressed in white, is supposedly the clergyman, while a black-suited Ringo Starr is meant to be the undertaker. George Harrison, meanwhile, has ditched the suits in favour of workman-like overalls — he’s the alleged gravedigger.

McCartney, apparently the dead man walking, is out of step with the others, leading with his right foot rather than his left.

McCartney is the only band member to be walking without shoes — a sign that he’s a corpse about the buried? That’s what the conspiracists would have you believe, although McCartney gave a far simpler explanation: he turned up to the shoot wearing flip-flops, but took them off before crossing the road because it was such a hot day.

A famously left-handed bassist, McCartney is in fact holding his cigarette in his right hand — a simple mistake made by an unknowing body double?

The theory gained an unexpected boost in 2003 when the cigarette was removed from the cover. But rather than the work of dark forces acting to quell the truthers, it was in fact the misstep of an overly eager American poster copy, which airbrushed the image without the permission of either McCartney or the image-rights owner, Apple Corps.

A white Volkswagen Beetle can be seen parked up on the side of the street, with a number plate that reads “LMW 28IF”.

The first part, so the story goes, stands for “Linda McCartney Weeps”. It would make sense, but the timeline doesn’t match. The pair hadn’t even met by the time of the alleged 1966 crash.

That’s the first line debunked, then. How about the second, “28IF”? Many alleged that this was a reference to Paul’s age — if he hadn’t perished in the crash, he would have been 28 years old by the time of the photo shoot. Except he wouldn’t. Some quick maths tells us McCartney would have in fact been 27.

It hasn’t stopped the number plate becoming the subject of great interest though, having been stolen multiple times in the years that followed. The car itself now sits in a German museum.

If McCartney, arguably the world’s most famous musician in 1966, had actually died in a gruesome crash, it would have taken one almighty cover-up to suppress the news. The authorities would surely have been involved — so is the police van parked on the right-hand side of the street a nod to some grand deception?

It doesn’t seem so. In fact, it had most likely been left there by the copper who was in charge of stopping traffic while the photoshoot took place.

On the back of the album, there is a picture of a wall with the words “Beatles Abbey Road” on it. Next to the capital B of “Beatles” there are eight marks which, if loosely traced, draw out the number three. Therefore, it’s been suggested this is a sign only three Beatles remain, sans McCartney.

Now, bear with us here. The letters are split into four broad sections which, if split up, spell out “BE AT LES ABBEY RO AD”. R and O are the 18th and 15th letters of the alphabet which, when added together, make 33. Multiply this by two — the number of letters — and we have 66. This number, next to the AD, led some to believe it’s an allusion to the year of McCartney’s supposed death, 1966 AD.

And that’s not it. The number three could represent the letter C, so 33 would be CC. CC sounds like Cece, which is short for Cecilia.

Add all of this together and what do we have? A very tenuous link to St Cecilia’s Abbey on the Isle of Wight which, some have claimed, is where the real McCartney was buried after the crash.

On the top right-hand corner of the wall, there is a shadow. Tilt your head to right slightly, squint, and you might see something resembling the face of the grim reaper — yet another case of deathly symbolism.

The woman in the blue dress, captured in a blur as she walks past the wall, has never been formally identified. Some have posited the theory that she is meant to symbolise McCartney’s girlfriend from 1966, fleeing the scene of the crash.

If those theories weren’t wacky enough, this last one really takes the conspiracist’s biscuit. Some imaginative theorists claim that Paul McCartney’s profile can be seen on the woman’s arm — her elbow is the mouth, while his nose is further up towards the tricep. Can you make it out? No, us neither.