I know it’s a cliché and a bucket list item for London tourists from across the world on the same annoyingly frivolous level as patting a guardsman’s horse at Whitehall, but I just had to do it.
To make matters worse, I was born in Britain and lived there for 36 years, and I must have ridden across the iconic zebra crossing countless times as a London motorcycle courier, cursing at Instagram morons 25 years before Instagram became a thing.
But I was in London with my son and three grandkids, and I would never get another chance in this lifetime to stamp my own legend on ancient history, so I did it anyway.
This was the equivalent of capturing the moment when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, changing his and the world’s destiny; or when Neil Armstrong led the Americans on to the face of the moon and won the Cold War.
This was my chance to arrange and oversee this moment.
So, I journeyed from Hackney Central to St John’s Wood via the Jubilee Line and walked the bitterly cold half a mile to the junction of Abbey Rd and Grove End Rd where The Beatles made that throwaway decision for their final album cover on the morning of August 8, 1969.
On that Friday, a policeman held up the traffic as photographer Iain Macmillan climbed a stepladder in the middle of the road to photograph the Fab Four walk across the zebra crossing outside the EMI Studios where they were just putting the finishing touches to their final album.
I didn’t have the luxury of a policeman to stop the traffic as I hastily held up my mobile phone in between a gap in the traffic.
We had to wait our turn in the queue of other souvenir hunters to snap our own Rubicon moment.
People at the crossing spoke in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Chinese and American – but we all shared the same unspoken Beatlespeak.
This was a cold grey morning in early November and there were already about 30 people wrapped in coats and scarves gathered on the pavement.
I could only imagine how chaotic things would get at the height of a London summer.
Traffic was constant with drivers generally polite except for one or two who had seen it all before and were in a hurry to be somewhere.
Most either slowed down or came to a stop to allow people their chance at pop glory.
I was being the Fifth Beatle, so when it was my little band’s turn, on my hand signal they marched out on to the hallowed plain of Elysium – Dad led the way, his boys fell into step behind him in ascending height and age from six, to nine then 10.
It was all over in a few seconds.
It took The Beatles six goes to get the photo they wanted, but my band knew what to do, and we did it in one take.
A lot of dads coach their families in footy lore to become the next generation of Pies or Bombers.
I had been coaching my team in Beatleology for 30 years.
Big steps, swing the arms, look straight ahead, don’t hurry, stay cool.
When the photo appeared on the cover of The Beatles’ album Abbey Road in September 1969, it came at the end of a vague discussion about going to the Himalayas and snapping the boys in front of Everest.
In the end, just as they had done with their rooftop concert six months earlier, they thought sod it – let’s just go outside and get it over with. End of story.
The photo came to symbolise the end of the hedonism and wild experiment that was the ’60s.
Lennon led his band out of the recording studio for the last time, stepping out of the family bubble and into the world as an individual.
On that November morning, my little band marched in step behind their leader too – but of course, each member was stifling the urge to run ahead and march to their own tune.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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