Earliest ever full recording of a Beatles gig unearthed by Radio 4’s Front Row show
Schoolboy’s recording comes to light after 60 years
The Beatles‘ show for pupils of public school Stowe, just before Beatlemania took hold, has emerged on tape some six decades on.
The recording, which languished undiscovered by experts before being featured on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row last night, is the earliest of a full Beatles show in existence.
The then 15-year-old pupil John Bloomfield – now in his 70s – was a self-confessed technology geek and wanted to try out a new reel-to-reel tape recorder. The band had been booked by a pupil who wrote to Brian Epstein who agreed they could play for a fee of £100, with the money raised by selling tickets to classmates.
The show, on 4 April 1963, was described as one of the band’s “ballroom” sets, typically around an hour long, as opposed to their “theatre” shows that were usually 30 minutes. They played 22 songs including many of the cover versions they had perfected in their Hamburg residencies, as well as the entire tracklisting of their first album Please Please Me.
Although the recording does feature some female screaming from the back of the hall, the predominately male audience ensured that the band were not drowned out by high volume hysteria, a problem which ruined later recordings and ultimately led the band to give up playing live in 1966.
Some excerpts from the show, along with photos of the band at the school, have been posted on YouTube: