BBC Radio 4's Front Row has unveiled the earliest known complete recording of The Beatles playing a live concert in the UK, just as the band was on the cusp of national fame. The hour-long
tape was recorded by 15-year-old John Bloomfield at Stowe boarding school in Buckinghamshire on 4 April 1963, when the band performed a concert at the school's theatre. The band had been booked by fellow pupil David Moores, who wrote to manager Brian Epstein. Epstein agreed to the booking for a fee of £100, and Moores raised funds by selling tickets to schoolmates.
Bloomfield was a self-proclaimed tech geek who was eager to try out a new reel-to-reel tape recorder. Now in his 70s, he revealed the existence of the tape while Front Row was making a special programme about the 60th anniversary of the concert at Stowe. The recording captures the charm of The Beatles' tightly-honed live act, with a blend 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. The album was released just two weeks earlier, on 22 March.
The recording features the opening track I Saw Her Standing There from the album, followed by Chuck Berry's Too Much Monkey Business. The performance was unique as it was played in front of an almost entirely male audience. Crucially, despite the loud cheers and some screaming, the tape is not drowned out by the audience reaction.
Mark Lewisohn, a Beatles historian, and Bloomfield are the only individuals who have heard the complete recording after Bloomfield agreed to play it for the first time since the recording was made. Part of the tape will be played on Front Row on Monday (3 April). Lewisohn remarked on the significance of the tape, stating that "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. And at that point, all audience recordings become blanketed in screams."
Remarkably, the recording captures the band taking requests from the schoolboys, who shouted out the names of songs that had been released just two weeks earlier. The banter between the band and audience reveals John Lennon doing joke voices, the immense popularity of Ringo Starr, and the fact that George Harrison had lost his voice and was unable to sing. Although Stowe was a boys' school at the time, some girls were watching the performance from the back. Bloomfield remarked that "It wasn't until they started playing that we heard the screaming, and we realised we were in the middle of Beatlemania. It was just something we'd never even vaguely experienced."
Bloomfield said the concert had a significant impact on him, remarking that "I would say I grew up at that very instant. It sounds a bit of an exaggeration, but I realised this was something from a different planet." The band had arrived late from a recording at the BBC Paris Studios and, used to playing two half-hour sets, managed to play more than 22 songs in an hour. The tape presents a rare opportunity to hear The Beatles in an environment where they could be heard, with the tape capturing them properly, at a time when they could converse with the audience. Photo by EMI, Wikimedia commons.