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“Look at Ringo – he doesn’t even know what he’s doing there,” says Philip Townsend, standing in front of one of his most famous photographs. It’s a picture of the Beatles taken during their visit to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Bangor, Wales, in 1967, and featured in Beatles to Bowie: The 60s Exposed, a new show at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Ringo does look like he’d rather be having a pint, Paul’s expression can only be described as deep scepticism, and John Lennon is kneeling, seemingly transfixed, at the Yogi’s feet.

“If you look carefully,” says Townsend, “you can see flower petals on the floor. John had been eating the flower when I came in.”

What on earth for? Townsend shrugs. “It’s just the kind of thing he did.”

Alas, I can’t show you the image, because it’s under copyright restriction, so you’ll just have to come to London to see it for yourself, along with 150 other photos, many of them never exhibited before. It’s a very cool look at the way that pop music and fashion and photography were young and blithe together – a more innocent time, at least for the photographers. In those days, they didn’t have to worry about navigating days-long shoots and endless contracts and more layers of bureaucracy than a black-forest cake.

For the Beatles shoot, Townsend just showed up, heard the boys and the Yogi in the next room, went in and began snapping. He was in his early twenties; they were all shaking the postwar world together. “These days you just couldn’t do that,” he says. “You wouldn’t get within a mile of them.”

Those were the days when David Bailey’s assistant on a shoot would be a nice Dartford lad called Mick Jagger (Bailey, the most famous of the lot and the model for David Hemmings’ character in Blow-Up, has his photos covering an entire wall.) The show represents “a social moment,” says Jon Savage, the great writer on pop and punk, who wrote the foreward to the catalogue: England was trapped between austerity and wealth, with Victorian buildings half destroyed and modernist monoliths taking their place. Together, photographers and pop stars felt their way into the future.

Some of the results are stunning: In 1966, Tony Frank took a picture of Tom Jones, all black-leather cool, standing on a hill overlooking the grim industrial blight of his hometown, Pontypridd. He’d just had a hit with The Green, Green Grass of Home.

What you also realize, looking at these pictures, is how definitively they created a template that’s still used today. A photo of the Animals as lounging Northern toughs outside a pub? That could be Oasis. The Yardbirds, in skinny black trousers and artfully messy hair, staring sullenly into the camera? I saw a picture last week of the Editors that could have come from the same shoot.

It’s easy to idealize those times – and to desperately covet Lulu’s eyeliner. Could it possibly have been as much fun as it seemed? “Yes, but you didn’t realize it at the time,” says Townsend. “You were young, you didn’t know it was a fantastic thing that had never happened before and would probably never happen again.”