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On Aug. 6, 1965, the Beatles issued their fifth LP, Help!, comprising the seven songs featured in their just-released feature film of the same name, plus seven additional tracks. (The U.S. version was offered as a soundtrack album that included only the songs appearing in the film, plus additional incidental music.) In 1965, adventurously offbeat or arty record album covers were rare in the pop music world, and Help! did not contribute much to breaking that pattern, offering a rather plain display of the group and album names, along with a picture of the Fab Four garbed in clothing they wore while filming skiing sequences in the Austrian Alps for the Help! movie: But as Beatles fans were wont to do -- especially in the wake of the Paul is dead rumor that erupted several years later -- enthusiasts scoured all aspects of the band's records for hidden messages and meanings. In this particular case, the rumored secret message was the interesting (if unexciting) claim that the Beatles were posed on the album cover in such a way that their arm positions spelled out H-E-L-P in semaphore. In fact, the Beatles weren't posed in a way that spelled out H-E-L-P, or anything else meaningful, in semaphore. Their arm positions corresponded, at best, to either the sequence N-U-J-V or N-V-U-J, depending upon whether one examined the U.K. or U.S. version of the album (which featured slightly different arrangements of the four group members on their covers): Photographer Robert Freeman, who shot the cover for Help! as well as three other Beatles albums, acknowledged that he had initially considered trying to arrange the group shot to spell out H-E-L-P, but in the end he opted to simply go with the positioning that had the best visual appeal -- regardless of meaning: In the world of Beatles conspiracy theory, NUJV is sometimes claimed to be an abbreviation for New Unknown James Vocalist, a reference to the look-alike and sound-alike musician who was supposedly tapped to secretly replace James Paul McCartney after the latter's untimely death in the 1960s.
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