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The Beatles: One of the Earliest Known Fab Four Recordings Comes to Light

A live performance recording of the Beatles from 1963, now widely considered the earliest tape of the legendary quartet, has emerged. Six decades ago, the Beatles were on the cusp of fame, but hadn’t become global superstars just yet.

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The modest performance occurred nearly sixty years ago to the day on April 4, 1963 at the artists’ local school theater on home soil.

John Bloomfield, just a teenaged boarding student at Stowe in Buckinghamshire at the time, wanted to test out his new reel-to-reel tape recorder during the show. The show, recently unveiled on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, began with “I Saw Her Standing There.” It then transitions into Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.”

The recording “captures the appeal of The Beatles’ tightly-honed live act,” according to the Corporation, “with a mixture of their club repertoire of R&B covers and the start of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership, with tracks off their debut album Please Please Me, which had been released barely two weeks earlier, on 22 March.”

Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn said the taping is particularly special because of the sound clarity — a total rarity for live performances during the band’s Beatle-mania era.

“The opportunity that this tape presents, which is completely out of the blue, is fantastic because we hear them just on the cusp of the breakthrough into complete world fame,” Lewisohn said. “And at that point, all audience recordings become blanketed in screams.”

The Beatles two remaining, living members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr continue to make music six decades later

He added, “So here is an opportunity to hear them in the U.K., in an environment where [you can hear them] and where the tape actually does capture them properly, at a time when they can have banter with the audience as well.”

The crowd noise picked up by Bloomfield’s equipment is mostly just requests from concert-goers. Some cheering is also audible, but nothing like the eruption of young girls that the Beatles witnessed just a few years later.

Bloomfield, now 70, said the tape remained locked up his entire life in a safe.

“I think it’s an incredibly important recording,” added historian Lewisohn. “And I hope something good and constructive and creative eventually happens to it.”

The band officially split in 1970, but their music never left the social consciousness of the 20th century. Even today, new histories, documentaries, and creative pursuits centered around the ‘Fab Four’ are commissioned and released.

A Danny Boyle-helmed film based on the band’s music, Yesterday, came out in June 2019. Reissues of the Beatles’ catalog continue to top sales charts around the globe. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson even produced previously-unseen final recording sessions, and the band’s legendary performance atop the Apple Corps headquarters in London, for an exhaustive three-part documentary series, Get Back, which came out in 2021.