John Lennon and Paul McCartney travel to Greece

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On this day, July 22, 1967, Paul McCartney and his girlfriend Jane Asher joined John Lennon, his wife Cynthia and son Julian, Pattie Harrison’s 16-year-old sister Paula Boyd, Mal Evans, and NEMS employee Alistair Taylor on a trip to Athens, Greece. They aimed to explore a group of Greek islands that The Beatles were interested in purchasing to live on. The remaining group members, George and Pattie Harrison, Ringo Starr and Neil Aspinall, had already travelled to Greece two days before.

To reach the islands, they had arranged for a luxurious yacht named MV Arvi. However, it was delayed due to a storm off Crete, so they stayed at the residence of Alexis Mardas in Athens until it arrived on July 25, 1967.

Alexis Mardas had befriended The Beatles a few months earlier in London. He arrived in England in 1965, became friends with John Dunbar of the Indica Gallery in London, and later moved in with him in a flat on Bentinck Street, which was where Mardas first met John Lennon.

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I was in my office one day that summer when the Beatles’ private phone rang. It was John calling to say that the Beatles were moving out of England! The idea had come to him the previous night in the studio, when Magic Alex was attending a session. The Beatles were talking about how sick and tired they were of notoriety and were bemoaning how restrictive it was for them to live in London. John suggested they escape it all by creating their own little kingdom, like an island. […]

The very next day I dispatched Magic Alex and Alistair Taylor, who was now office manager and took care of sundry chores for the Beatles, off to Greece to find an island. Not forty-eight hours later Alex phoned to say that he had located a place God had created just for them. It was a tiny cluster of islands twenty-five miles out into the Aegean, 100 acres in all. There was a large main island with four secluded beaches and five smaller satellite islands surrounding it. There were also sixteen acres of rich olive groves on the large island, which Alex computed would pay back the cost of the six islands in just seven years’ time. All this a bargain at £90,000. The Beatles impetuously agreed to leave for Greece at once.

According to Alex, in a story told here for the first time, before the Beatles set out for Athens, he contacted a high government official he identifies as the “vice president of Greece” and asked the man if he knew who the Beatles were. “Yes, they’re a pop group,” the man answered. “But what does this have to do with me?”

“They could be of tremendous publicity value to you if you cooperate in making their journey pleasant,” Alex said. He struck a deal with the government official; if the Beatles were given VIP treatment, and not searched at the airport, they would pose for a set of publicity pictures for the Ministry of Tourism to show how benevolent Greece was; in effect, diplomatic immunity in exchange for an endorsement of the junta. […]

Peter Brown – From “The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles“, 2002

It was 1967 and I was searching the Aegean for a get-away-from-it-all island for the Beatles with the Beatles’ technical wizard Alexis Mardas. Magic Alex was one of the many extraordinary characters the Beatles attracted in their heyday. He was a particular friend of John’s and very nearly as peculiar. But he was good company and he was Greek. We had a great time doing this recce. Eventually, we found a beautiful island of about 80 acres with four superb beaches. So the Beatles could have one each if they wanted. And it even had four smaller islands circled around it.

The Greek island was priced to sell at £90,000 and it looked like just what the Beatles ordered. But this was at a time of currency restrictions so nothing was as easy as it seemed. The Beatles wanted to take a look for themselves and have a holiday into the bargain and I sprang into action to organise it. Alex went off to Greece to prepare his father’s house in Athens for us and to hire a large enough yacht to accommodate Paul and Jane, John, Cynthia and Julian, George and Patti, Ringo and Maureen, Big Mal Evans and his wife, Neil Aspinall and me. […]

We arrived to find Alex with a face full of taramasalata announcing that the motor yacht had been caught up and damaged in a fierce storm around Crete and would not be ready for a few days. So some Athens sight-seeing was swiftly arranged. Only someone kindly told the Greek tourist board of our movements and everywhere we went there were hordes of fans.

Alistair Taylor – From “With the Beatles: A Stunning Insight by The Man who was with the Band Every Step of the Way“, 2011

Alex [Mardas] invited John on a boat holiday in Greece, and we were all then invited. There was some story of buying a Greek island or something. It was all so sort of abstract but the first thing we had to do is go to Greece and see if we even liked it out there. The idea was get an island where you can just do what you want, a sort of hippie commune where nobody’d interfere with your lifestyle. I suppose the main motivation for that would probably be no one could stop you smoking. Drugs was probably the main reason for getting some island, and then all the other community things that were around then – ‘Oh, we’ll paint together. We’ll do this. I’ll chop wood.

I think that if you’re going to write a great symphony or you’re going to rehearse the greatest string quartet in the world, it’s fair enough to cut yourself off. It’s just a practical matter; give yourself lots of time and if you’re going to do that, then why shouldn’t it be in Greece? It was a drug-induced ambition, we’d just be sitting around: ‘Wouldn’t it be great? The lapping water, sunshine, we’d be playing. We’d get a studio there. Well, it’s possible these days with mobiles and …’ We had lots of ideas like that. The whole Apple enterprise was the result of those ideas.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

Three months earlier the democratic Greek government had been overthrown in a military coup, ostensibly to prevent any Marxist influences from corrupting the nation. The new regime tortured and executed its opponents with the minimum of judicial process. […]

‘I’m not worried about the political situation in Greece, as long as it doesn’t affect us,’ Lennon declared. ‘I don’t care if the government is all fascist or communist.’ Their more socially aware friends, such as Barry Miles, were shocked by their indifference. ‘I was horrified,’ he recalled. ‘As I remember it, Paul was faintly embarrassed by it all, but John wasn’t concerned.’ Paul McCartney’s political misgivings were, in any case, outweighed by more selfish concerns: ‘I suppose the main motivation would probably be [that] no one could stop you smoking. Drugs was probably the main reason for getting some island.’

From “You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup” by Peter Doggett

Although Epstein still exercised his guidance over the Beatles’ careers, before he died [in August 1967] he had at least begun to allow them more contact with the world-at-large, from which he had kept them shielded for so long. In July they went off to Greece to buy an island, an idea Brian disapproved of, but with which he went along. Giving the Beatles a free rein was a hard decision for Brian, who was still devoted to them and wanted to protect them at all costs.

From “Apple To The Core” by Peter McCabe and Robert D. Schonfeld

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Last updated on February 24, 2024