YOU have a week left to catch an extraordinary exhibition of photos of the young Beatles, Jagger and Hendrix before they were famous. Paul Berriff's Rock Legends is at Pocklington Arts Centre until August 29. Don't miss it, says STEPHEN LEWIS

AS a teenager, Paul Berriff dreamed of being a photographer. He'd look at the photos on the front of Picture Post and Life Magazine that he was delivering on his Yorkshire paper round, and think: I want to do that.

In 1963, he got his chance, signing up as a trainee editorial assistant on the Yorkshire Evening Post.

It was the bottom rung of the journalistic ladder. Determined to hone his skills, he decided he'd 'practise his photography' by taking pictures of young rock and pop stars just starting out on their careers who were playing the northern cinema circuit in Leeds, Wakefield and Doncaster.

The acts he was able to photograph weren't well-known - no-one of the stature of Helen Shapiro, for example. They were virtual unknowns: a band called The Rolling Stones; a young rock guitarist by the name of Jimi Hendrix; and four mop-topped young men from Liverpool who went by the peculiar name of The Beatles.

Paul was given unprecedented access backstage to practise his photography on these young unknowns as they prepared to take to the stage. And then he put his negatives away in a box and forgot about them.

He went on to have a hugely successful career, as first a BBC News film cameraman and later as a director, producer and film-maker on both sides of the Atlantic.

Those early negatives lay dormant in a box in his Bedale attic for years. But when he dug them out a few years ago, he found them still in pristine condition.

In the intervening years, of course, the young musicians he had photographed so intimately had become rock legends. So what else could he do but put his photographs on show?

His Rock Legends exhibition was first shown at Salts Mill, Saltaire in 2014. Luckily for us, it has now arrived at Pocklington Arts, where it will remain until August 29.

And what an exhibition it is. Paul was given extraordinary access to the young musicians, and there's a wonderful intimacy about the black and white images he took on his Rolleiflex camera. Hendrix has the look of a street urchin with a pinched, hungry face; the young Jagger even then had those full, pouting lips, combined with an almost girlish complexion and lashes; and The Beatles ... well, they were just having fun, larking about for the camera in a way that would become impossible just a few months later when they shot to international fame.

Paul was invited down to the Abbey Road Studios to photograph a young band calling themselves Pink Floyd in the act of recording; and there are lovely portraits, too, of the likes of Marianne Faithful - a beautiful picture taken in Doncaster in 1964 when the whole world was ahead for the young singer.

Paul's exhibition is not called Rock Legends for nothing. But in his own unassuming way the photographer who captured those extraordinary pictures is a legend, too. This is one exhibition not to be missed.

BLOB Paul Berriff's Rock Legends, Pocklington Arts Centre until August 29