T he black ankle boots – suspiciously familiar to long-term Beatle watchers - that strode across the stage at the London Stadium to settle at a grand piano, metres from the looming 23-ton Olympic bell, contained Britain's greatest living musical icon. It was just after midnight on July 27, 2012 and following a dazzling, carnival-esque opening ceremony culminating in the dramatic lighting of the Olympic torch, the entire stadium was in a state of heightened euphoria.

Thunderous displays of fireworks boomed across the East London skyline swelling the crowd's cheers, as Pink Floyd’s incantatory Eclipse reverberated around the grounds, and the newly-lit torch blazed.

Over the past three hours, the stadium's 80,000 spectators had witnessed a show which was nothing less than epic - with 12,000 performers and 10,000 athletes participating in a retelling of British history, from the Industrial Revolution to the Arctic Monkeys, the birth of the NHS to Mr Bean. The Grimethorpe Colliery Band played, David Beckham sped down the Thames in a glowing speedboat. The Queen appeared to sky dive from a helicopter into the stadium, alongside Daniel Craig’s James Bond. Stunning technical, visual and choreographic marvels led one dazzling set piece into the next. This was unlike anything London had ever staged before.

Devised by film director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, the ceremony was intended as a panoramic celebration of the British people, their history, diversity, creativity and culture, within a global context. (At one point, a helicopter dropped seven billion pieces of confetti, symbolising the world’s population). How could Boyle and Cottrell Boyce possibly round off an event of that magnitude?

“Paul McCartney was chosen for the fairly obvious reason that we were celebrating British music and he is far and away its most important living artist,” says Frank Cottrell Boyce today. “Apart from his incalculable contribution to our culture, he also seems to embody the best of us in a human sense. Hugely ambitious, but never pretentious, massively successful but beautifully grounded in the things that really matter - love, family, generosity and an unswerving idealism. What did Yeats say? ‘Our Sidney, and our perfect man’”.

Amidst the billowing firework smoke and spotlights straffing the London sky, 'our Sidney, and our perfect man’s piano and voice cut through the cheers, with the final lyric of the Beatles’ final album, Abbey Road, the poignant couplet piercing the shimmering night air, and beaming out to an estimated 900 million viewers worldwide.

“And in the end/The love you make/Is equal to the love/You take”

(The Beatles 'The End' (1969) Lyrics by Lennon/McCartney)

“Danny picked ‘The End’ because he wanted the ceremony to have a proper ending,” says Cottrell Boyce. “And ‘The End’ is (a) an ending, and (b) all about love. The ceremony had really tried to push love and generosity as themes - about the best side of us”.

Following ‘The End’, the giant Olympic bell tolled again, and McCartney began to sing ‘Hey Jude’, its stately momentum building to a climax of unity and joy. A national anthem, it evoked the world-straddling Beatles’ own Olympian heights of success and creativity in its rousing finale, lustily sung now by the audience. The 2012 London Olympics was ready to surge to success.

“Me and my boots have great memories of that special evening at the Olympics opening ceremony in London,” McCartney told Sotheby’s in 2024. “It was a high to be involved with such an awesome and spectacular event. Something I’ll remember forever.”

“There’s no warm-up, you just come in cold and you’ve got to get up to speed,” McCartney had told Shortlist magazine a few days before the event. “It’s like asking an athlete to do his thing without a warm-up: run in, do 100m and you’re off.”

Even without this nerve-jangling 100 metre sprint, 2012 was already shaping up as a particularly vintage year for McCartney. In February, Paul had issued a collection of romantic 20th century standards, Kisses On The Bottom, a critically-acclaimed hit album which would scoop a Grammy award the following year.

The following month, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences announced McCartney as their MusiCares Person of the Year. Two days after that, he performed at the 54th Grammy Awards. May saw him back on the road for the ‘On The Run’ tour, playing two of the biggest gigs of his performing career to date; 500,000 people in Zócalo, Mexico City. And back in the UK, June saw an event that, even with the intervening years of dizzying fame and acclaim, would have been unimaginable to the 10 year old Paul McCartney watching the 1952 Coronation: he headlined Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace.

The Mexico City gigs, Olympic ceremony and Diamond Jubilee all fell during one of McCartney’s most successful world tours to date. ‘On The Run’ had begun in New York City in July 2011, eventually concluded in Edmonton, Canada that November. With a set list steeped in Beatles, solo and Wings classics, faithfully performed with verve and gusto, McCartney stormed stages worldwide with a stripped back and elegant show. There were no – or, comparatively few - garish rock star outfits at a McCartney gig these days. Instead, in an evolution that had begun with his ‘Flowers In The Dirt’ tours of 1989-1990, he happily celebrated his Beatles past musically and sartorially, comfortable in his own Olympian achievements and visibly delighted in the euphoria Beatles music still inspired in successive generations.

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It was a thrill for audiences from Montevideo to Moscow, Abu Dhabi to Edmonton, to see the man behind the greatest body of songs in pop music, taking to the stage in a wardrobe of purest Pathé Newsreel black’n’white. The dark jacket or vest, white shirt, tapered dark trousers and of course, those iconic black Beatle boots. Playing his Hofner ‘violin’ bass, or Beatle-era psychedelic piano, Paul immediately evoked halcyon days, innocent times, and timeless music, from the frantic Mod energy of the A Hard Day’s Night era to the elegantly semi-suited maturity of the final Abbey Road years.

“He’s created a very separate identity for himself” says Paulo Hewitt, author of ‘Fab Gear: The Beatles and Fashion’, and long-term chronicler of British pop culture. “After the 1970s and 1980s and then following Britpop and the resurgence of the Beatles’ popularity in the 1990s, he’s happy wearing the Beatles-style jackets, boots and waistcoats. He’s at peace with his past. He’s comfortable with that legacy.”

McCartney’s clean visual aesthetic not only summoned the spirit of the 1960s, it served as a creative palette that allowed for tweaks and accents to be incorporated where required; a splash of colour here, a topical twist there. For the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, Paul’s brisk stage outfit - created with the involvement of daughter Stella – was a sleek, form-fitting long black jacket, accented with a red stripe and discreet Olympic motifs on the sleeve.

Completing the look, was a pair of black, Cuban-heeled ankle boots, similar to the ones previously in action at Buckingham Palace, that would go on to tread dozens of stages around the world in the following years. Distinctly reminiscent of the Beatles’ trademark black boots, and handmade from cruelty-free materials, it is this exact pair which Paul has personally donated from his archive to be sold at Sotheby’s, to benefit Meat Free Monday.

“It’s not often that such a personal item comes to auction directly from an artist, so it really is an honour to be entrusted with these boots, which were worn at such a memorable moment for Paul McCartney,” says Katherine Schofield, Sotheby’s Head of Department, Rock, Pop & Film, Popular Culture. “I have such a vivid memory of that concert and Paul closing the ceremony, singing ‘Hey Jude’! It felt like the whole of the UK was singing along with him.”

In the rarified, artisanal world of traditional boot making, Steven Lowe is something of a legend. Beginning as an apprentice last-maker – shaping wooden moulds based on exacting measurements of the foot - at historic bootmakers John Lobb forty years ago, Lowe founded his own company, Crispinians in 2012. It’s based in a picturesque 18th century workshop, in Eastbourne on the south coast, where Lowe and his team specialise in bespoke boot making for private clients and shoemakers - pattern cutting, closing, hand-stitched welting and of course, traditional hand-carved wooden lasts, around which heels, toes, soles, and uppers harmoniously coalesce.

Lowe has been building custom-made shoes and boots for Paul McCartney for many years. He has three ‘Beatle boot’ designs on file for Paul, specifically designed by McCartney’s team. Steven personally measures the Fab foot on a regular basis, to make the wooden lasts which are pressed into service every time he is asked to produce a new pair of boots. And such is his painstaking attention to detail, skill and craftsmanship, Steven Lowe’s relationship with McCartney has endured for years, continuing to this day.

“When I’m asked to build a pair of shoes for Paul, his team will select which of the designs we have that they want. The design might need tweaking – I might alter a few lines here or there – but I certainly did not design them, their designs go back a long time”.

The boots Lowe created for Paul were modelled on the classic ‘Beatle boots’, made almost as stupendously famous as the group themselves, during the first flush of Beatlemania. Ubiquitous today, Chelsea boots, as they became known due to their association with the most chic London borough of the mid-1960s, were virtually unknown to the wider public back in 1962.

Descendants of Victorian horse riding boots created for Queen Victoria, by the early 1960s, the elastic-sided boots were mainly worn by Spanish Flamenco performers, before being taken up by dandies, beatniks, and other such antisocial reprobates. The pointed toes, elasticated high sides and a distinctive ridge down the upper were impossibly exotic to a Britain, where even garlic was viewed with suspicion by most respectable people.

To many in the UK, the first glimpse of the Beatles, suits, boots and all, came in scattered television performances over winter 1962/1963. To the delight of disbelieving teenagers across the snowbound nation, the group seemed to have been beamed in from a distant universe, crashing staid British television entertainment programmes with their low-cut fringes, cheery grins and catchy American-inspired R&B.

Their boots became another quick visual reference for the emergent young pop pharaohs, alongside the mop top haircuts, Paul’s left-handed violin bass and the ‘drop T’ Beatles logo on Ringo’s bass drum.

“Those Cuban-heel boots first appeared around 1959, in Anello & Davide, as flamenco stage boots,” says Paolo Hewitt. “By 1962, the public hadn’t yet picked up on them, but when the Beatles started wearing them, that’s when everyone did. And that’s when the Beatles would move on to something else. They’d start a trend, like, how they took Motown records and popularised them - and then move on to the next thing. It’s something they were very, very good at doing. Their collarless jackets, for example. Once Gerry and the Pacemakers and the others started wearing them, they were like, that’s it, we’re not wearing them anymore. The Beatle boots were part of that.”

Predictably, in the immediate cyclone of madness around the Beatles, dozens of Beat groups burst into life across the UK, all equipped with Beatles-length hair, matching Mod suits and Merseybeat-style songs, but Anello & Davide boots. And as the ‘British Invasion’ of mop-topped groups laid waste to the USA in 1964, the boots gained millions of new impressionable admirers.

When London’s Dave Clark Five made their US television debut that year, the cameras began by panning up from their stomping feet, clad in the now-ubiquitous boots. It had a seismic effect on American teenagers, one of whom, a young Chrissie Hynde of Akron, Ohio told The Guardian many years later: “I remember the Dave Clark Five [on television], wearing these sorts of Cuban-heeled boots. The camera just started on their boots. That made a huge impression on me…”

Back in Britain, the craze was now in full swing. In his autobiography, drummer Mick Fleetwood recalled: “As a band, like a thousand others, we all went to a shoe shop called Anello & Davide and bought ourselves Beatle boots, which were basically Spanish dancing boots. They were a cool thing before the Beatles, but afterwards they were mandatory.”

When the Beatles had first ordered their boots from Anello & Davide in 1961, they had insisted on the added lift provided by the then-novel ‘Cuban’ square heel, elevating the boot and adding another eccentric element to the band’s visual appeal. The heel would become an integral feature of the classic Beatle boot.

“This particular boot, because of the Cuban heel is higher than a regular dress shoe,” says Lowe today. “It’s lifted, so the instep becomes higher in the front, and the ball of the foot is resting in a slightly different position”.

The crafting process to create a pair of customised boots at Crispinians can take up to three months, with a pre-existing last. The use of special materials requires further time and skill, such as in the case of Paul’s 2012 stage boots. McCartney insists on cruelty-free vegan leather and to accommodate this directive, whilst retaining the appearance and texture of traditional shoe leather, Lowe was provided with ‘Alter Napper’, a faux leather made of polyester and polyurethane with vegetable oil and plant extracts.

“It’s a little more complex,” he concedes. “Vegan leather doesn't quite stretch in the same way as regular leather does. It’s made with various materials, including vegetable-based fibres from coconut husks, mushrooms, and pineapple. The material itself is quite delicate, so the patterns must be much more accurate, particularly around the bottom edge.”

The insistence on ‘Alter Napper’ comes of course, directly from Lowe’s client. Inspired by his late wife Linda, one of the UK’s most prominent advocates of a vegetarian lifestyle from the early 1970s until her death in 1997, McCartney and his daughters Mary and Stella today continue Linda’s mission to educate the public about the benefits of cruelty-free lifestyles.

Having enjoyed significant success in the 1980s and 1990s with her Linda McCartney range of family-friendly vegetarian foods, Meat Free Monday, the charity benefitting from the Sotheby’s sale of Paul’s stage boots, has been continuing to spread the word, in Linda’s easy-going, friendly manner, for 15 years now.

“As it was time for me to get myself a new pair of boots I thought this might be a good way to help our Meat Free Monday campaign celebrate its 15th anniversary” Paul told Sotheby’s.

And the timing couldn’t be better – after decades of campaigning, it seems that the McCartney’s message of healthy, sustainable eating has now embedded itself firmly in the mainstream. Today, vegetarian and vegan foods are commonplace, meat-free meals are commonplace, and plant-based products are no longer poor imitations of meat but enticing delicacies in their own right. Increasing numbers of people are eating mindfully, avoiding mass-produced meat and meat derivatives, for animal welfare, health and environmental reasons.

And as we see with Paul’s stage boots, worn by the man who has for years, set trends and brought the world with him, swerving animal products doesn’t mean sacrificing style, fashion or even, precious memories of a time when four young Liverpudlians changed the world. In fact, with McCartney’s role in changing public attitudes to vegetarian lifestyles, his impact on today’s world has gone far beyond changing the world of music. That old Beatle magic has had a significant hand in changing the way we eat and care for our environment too. Now that’s rock’n’roll.

Upcoming Auction

Sotheby's Sealed: Paul McCartney’s Personally Owned & Stage-Worn Tour Boots

24–31 May 2024 | 10:00 AM BST | London