Revealed: The Beatles’ first ever colour photograph, taken by Paul McCartney’s brother

There’s an old - and unfair joke - that Ringo Starr wasn’t the best drummer in The Beatles, never mind in Liverpool.

Now it has emerged that Paul McCartney’s younger brother Mike also held ambitions to fill the hot seat at the drums.

He has joked that if he hadn’t broken his arm, he would have been the obvious selection instead of Ringo.

As it happens, he went on to pursue a successful career as a photographer and performance artist.

The Telegraph can now reveal some of Mike McCartney’s rarely seen photographs of The Beatles, discovered by him when he was going through the boxes of films, negatives and prints in his archive - including the first colour photograph of the band when they were known as Quarrymen.

This was taken on March 8 1958 in the home of their aunt Jin, when George had just turned 15 and their future as a band that would change the face of music lay in front of them.

Mike said of the picture: “This may have been George’s first performance with the group. John, without his glasses, couldn’t see a thing - but we could clearly see from his red cheeks that he was bevvied. The lad with half a Guinness is Dennis Littler, one of cousin Ian’s friends.”

In one photograph, Paul is captured carrying a drum kit out of the house.

“Paul came home one day with a drum kit,” said Mike. “It was perfect because I wanted to play the drums. Maybe if I hadn’t broken my arm, I could have been a Beatle.”

Seeing the band so young in colour is a striking contrast to the monochrome Mike and other photographers normally used at the time.

Indeed, Mike added: “In those days, colour film was very expensive, so it would have been a special present from dad to get colour film for me. We used to get him a £1 Habana de Cuba cigar every year for Christmas and he would have got this as my gift.

“It’s brilliant to see Paul, John and George together in colour for the first time.”

The photograph is part of a body of work now being published in book form - including many images which have never been seen before - in one of the most intimate collections of portraits ever seen of the band that came to be known as the “fab four”.

Many show the boys in a domestic setting - for example, Paul through the windows of the brothers’ home at 20 Forthlin Road, now a National Trust property; on the beach at Filey, Yorkshire, in 1957, playing guitar to his father and his cousin Bett; or rowing a boat in Liverpool’s Sefton Park.

One previously unseen photograph shows Paul with his then girlfriend, Jane Asher, watching Mike’s own band The Scaffold at a Liverpool music club with their friend Ivan Vaughan - who had introduced John to Paul and helped make the whole thing possible.

Mike added: “I find lost photographs and drawings all the time. This will be my definitive statement of a magic era.”

In the few short years after Mike took these photographs, these ordinary lads went on to become the most famous and lastingly influential pop band in the world.

“Back then, we were just Liverpool lads trying to survive,” said Mike. “It’s only in retrospect, when you see the photographs in their historical context, that you recognise their significance.”

One of the most striking images - and one of Paul’s favourites - shows him and John in Nov 1962 sitting on chairs next to each other composing I Saw Her Standing There, one of the early songs that would revolutionise the British music scene and conquer the world.

It was the way the pair worked, guitar to guitar, a notebook for the lyrics in front of them, creating the Lennon and McCartney sound.

Mike, now 78, said: “Paul said this was one of the most important photographs I had ever taken because it showed him and John, exactly as they were together.

“They used to form ideas, write them out, rehearse, and then play them with the band.

““It shows the camaraderie, the togetherness and the professionalism of what they did. I still think about how lucky I was to capture this moment of musical history.”

Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool Collector’s Edition is available here.