It was a sweet slice of cultural history and, at the same time, evidence of an unlikely clash of English social classes. The discovery of a tape recording of an early Beatles concert made in 1963 at a Buckinghamshire private school last week has astonished music experts and fans alike.
The crackling, hissing 60-year-old tape, complete with audible banter from the Fab Four, is to be restored for wider listening, said the BBC journalist who uncovered the story, Samira Ahmed.
The former student who made the tape, John Bloomfield, hopes to have it enhanced with the same kind of technology that has recently improved other early Beatles demo tapes and first studio takes.
Photo: AFP
“Talks are under way to get [the tape] cleaned up and for a permanent home in a national cultural institution,” Ahmed said. “John feels strongly that it should not end up, as so many Beatles relics have, in the vault of a private individual.”
Bloomfield was the teenage stage manager for the concert in the Stowe School theater on April 4, 1963, and had the foresight to place a microphone at the front of the stage, which fed into his new Nagra III recording machine.
Fearing later that its poor quality made it worthless, he stored it away in his home while the band’s worldwide fame grew and grew, enduring even more than half a century after they last played together in public.
Most striking among the revelations on the tape is the set list, which sheds fresh light on the musical progression of the band at a point when they were on the cusp of stardom.
That list includes some US rhythm and blues standards — including I Just Don’t Understand and Matchbox — honed by the young band members during late-night stints at clubs in Hamburg’s red light district in the previous three years.
The running order that evening was also peppered with their own compositions, including From Me to You, which would go to No. 1 in the UK charts the following week, and tunes from their then-recently released album, Please Please Me, which were soon to become recognizable around the world.
Rumors of the tape’s existence had persisted down the decades and the current headmaster, Anthony Wallersteiner, suggested to Ahmed and Bloomfield, who visited the school last month with the BBC, that perhaps it might be time to find it.
Hearing the sound of the tape played, initially over the telephone, immediately persuaded Ahmed that her news story was about more than just marking the anniversary of an extraordinary event at the school.
Instead she said she was able to finally imagine the power of the moment that the Beatles sound first really began to be appreciated by British audiences.
“I felt my whole body vibrate with the sheer raw power of the Beatles,” Ahmed said.
Other revelations include suggestions that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were all fueled by more than just adrenaline and beer that night. After all, they have since admitted that their grueling German gigs were only possible with the help of a stimulant called Preludin.
It has also emerged that after the concert at Stowe, Starr, then 22, made a jokey lewd approach to one of the teenage girls who had been watching from the back of the hall, the daughters of school staff members.
“It must have been like a hurricane hitting that school,” Ahmed wrote in an article for the Observer. “They wolfed down chicken and chips in the school tuck shop, and on the walk back to the car, Ringo suggested a quick fumble in the bushes to one of the girls,” who politely declined.
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