Why Aren’t The Beatles Spelling ‘Help’ With Their Arms on the ‘Help!’ Album Cover?

On the cover of The Beatles’ fifth studio album, Help!, the band stands with their arms pointing in various directions. At first glance, it may seem that they’re spelling the album’s title, but they’re actually depicting a random series of letters. Here’s why they did away with their original plan of spelling out the album title with their arms.

The Beatles pose with their arms pointing in different directions on the ‘Help’ cover

The cover of Help! shows The Beatles in blue coats, lifting their arms in the air. From a distance, a quick glance could lead one to think they are spelling “help” with their arms — Paul McCartney certainly appears to be forming an “L” — but a second look makes it clear that this is not the word they’re forming. 

Photographer Robert Freeman said his initial intention was to have the band spell “help” in semaphore, a method of visual signaling. 

“The Beatles were filming a sequence in Austria where they stood on a skyline in the snow waving their arms to a music playback,” he said, per Snopes. “From this I had the idea of semaphore spelling out the letters HELP.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t look good. As a result, they decided to do whatever looked best.

“When we came to do the shot the arrangement of the arms with those letters didn’t look good,” Freeman said. “So we decided to improvise and ended up with the best graphic positioning of the arms.”

Instead of “HELP,” the band spells out “NUJV” or “NVUJ” depending on whether the record was printed in the United Kingdom or the United States.

The titular song was John Lennon’s expression of anguish

The song “Help!” from this album is upbeat, but John Lennon said he wrote it from a very low point in his life. It was a real cry for help for him.

“The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension,” he told Playboy in 1980. “When ‘Help’ came out, I was actually crying out for help. Most people think it’s just a fast rock ‘n roll song.”

He said the song began as a tune for the film Help, but it became something real for him.

“I didn’t realise it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie,” he said. “But later, I knew I really was crying out for help.”

The Beatles made a movie called ‘Help’

As Lennon mentioned, the song was for the film Help!. Lennon said he wasn’t sure of the plot as they were filming it, partially because the director didn’t explain it, and partially because he was constantly high.

“He never explained it to us,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “Partly, maybe, because we hadn’t spent a lot of time together between A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and partly because we were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period. Nobody could communicate with us; it was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time. In our own world. It’s like doing nothing most of the time, but still having to rise at 7 am; so we became bored.”

Ringo Starr said they all enjoyed the filming because of this.

“A hell of a lot of pot was being smoked while we were making the film,” he said. “It was great. That helped make it a lot of fun.”