An audio recording of a one-hour show made by the
Beatles
exactly 60 years ago
was released through the BBC site
by the person responsible for making the record in an amateur way.
This is
a performance that the group gave at the Stowe Boarding School for Boys
, in Buckinghamshire.
The Beatles were already on the rise and just two weeks ago they had released
Please Please Me
, their first studio album.
George Harrison in 1963, when the new tape that just appeared on the BBC was made.
Photo: AP
The Beatle sound of 1963
The BBC's Front Row
podcast
includes interviews and testimony, but only a small snippet of the group performing live.
a historical tape
The record was made by a 15-year-old named John Bloomfield, who wanted to test how his brand new tape recorder worked.
He is 75 years old today and
revealed the existence of the recording when the journalist Samira Ahmed interviewed him for a special on the 60th anniversary of the concert
.
According to Ahmed, "It was a unique show, because the audience was mostly male, and although there is applause and some shouting, the group is not covered by the howls of their fans, as it happens in other places full of girls."
This material thus constitutes the oldest complete concert of the Liverpool quartet available, because although there is a live album from December 1962 at the Star Club in Hamburg, it deals with records obtained over several nights.
The Beatles are in the news once again, this time for a tape of a show from 60 years ago.
The brand new testimony reveals that the concert lasted an hour in which the group performed 22 songs, in a repertoire that mixed songs from their debut album
Please Please Me
, which had come out two weeks earlier, as well as some covers by R&B artists like Chuck Berry
(Too Much Monkey Business
), which the group used to perform on their long pilgrimage to nightclubs.
A show for £100
As Bloomfield told the BBC,
the Beatles performed for a cachet of 100 pounds
and were hired by another student named David Moores, who was in charge of selling the tickets to raise the money.
He also recalled that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr had been delayed because they had come from a recording session at the BBC studios in Paris.
"I would say that I grew up in that very moment. It sounds a bit exaggerated, but I realized that this was something from a different planet," Bloomfield said, recalling the sensations experienced at the time.
In addition to being the group's first full-length live concert,
the tape is an invaluable testimonial for capturing the group at a time when what became known as "Beatlemania" was beginning to explode
.
In 2020, the school in Buckinghamshire put up a plaque commemorating the Beatles' visit.
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