Before music videos had a name, John Lennon sat at a kitchen table in Manhattan with a pack of felt-tip markers, coloring in cartoons of Beatles lyrics. Sixty-odd years later, some of those sheets are hanging on a wall in Liverpool.
Ten drawings from the set went on display on Thursday (June 4) at the Liverpool Beatles Museum on Mathew Street, where they will stay for several months, according to PA Media’s report via Hits Radio. They come from a run of 240 pop-art cels made with the artist and filmmaker Stephen Verona for a promotional film to go with the Beatles hit “I Feel Fine.” Many consider it one of the first music videos.
The show was put together by Joseph O’Donnell, a 29-year-old collector from Tynemouth. He told PA he spotted the drawings at a London auction, “where they weren’t really made a big deal of.” Each sheet carries one word of the lyric, so he could piece them back into a full sentence. The ones on view read “baby says she’s mine” and “in love with her,” plus single cels for “and” and “I.”
How They Were Made
Verona was directing a commercial in London when he met Lennon. “We started doodling drawings on a table, and I suggested making a film from them,” he recalled, per Visit Liverpool. He went home, drew bold, cartoonish images to fit the lyrics, and later Lennon visited his apartment to color them in by hand.
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The two-minute film, built from the 240 drawings, went on to screen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and win a CINE Golden Eagle, Smithsonian Magazine reports. The reel now lives at the Library of Congress. Verona held on to the drawings until 2000, when he sold the full set through Christie’s for $58,750. They were then scattered.
Why It Matters
The cels are a rare, hands-on look at Lennon making pop art in the mid-1960s, and a reminder that the music video, a format now taken for granted, started with two people drawing at a table. Some have called Verona’s film the first music video, Smithsonian notes, predating the term itself.
ARTnews also noted the show in its morning links. It sits alongside a summer of music-and-museum crossovers, from BTS at the British Museum to this month’s exhibitions. As O’Donnell put it: “I think interest in the Beatles will never go away.”
- Where
- Liverpool Beatles Museum, Mathew Street, Liverpool
- On view
- From June 4, 2026, for several months
- What
- Ten of 240 animation cels by John Lennon and Stephen Verona
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.
