On This Day: Schoolboy Records Earliest Known Full-Length Recording of The Beatles Live in Concert
On April 4, 1963, a schoolboy had no idea he was recording something important in music history. All he knew was that a band called The Beatles was performing at his school. All he cared about was using his new tape recorder. He managed to get the earliest known full-length recording of The Beatles live in concert.
A schoolboy wrote to Brian Epstein to ask if the band could perform at his school
Just as The Beatles were teetering on the cusp of international fame, their manager, Brian Epstein, received a letter from a schoolboy named David Moores (per BBC News).
The manager recognized that the Moores were just as well-known a family as his own. Epstein’s family owned a record store called NEMS (North End Music Stores), which started as a furniture store. The Moores family owned Littlewoods, a retail and football betting company.
Moores wrote to Epstein asking him if his band could perform at his school, Stowe boarding school in Buckinghamshire. Epstein likely saw this as a great opportunity for The Beatles, who had been touring the U.K. throughout 1963. Plus, this was Liverpool business. One well-known Liverpudlian family doing a favor for another.
Epstein agreed to let The Beatles perform. It was great exposure for the group, playing for school students who’d likely pester their parents for the group’s music after seeing them play. Epstein charged Moores 100 pounds, and the student raised funds by selling tickets to schoolmates.
Although the band had been performing all across the U.K., it was at the boarding school that the earliest recording of The Beatles in concert was recorded.
Moores’ schoolmate recorded the earliest known full-length recording of The Beatles in concert
15-year-old John Bloomfield recorded the hour-long quarter-inch tape recording of The Beatles’ performance at his school on April 4, 1963. It is the earliest known full-length recording of The Beatles live in concert.
Bloomfield was a self-confessed tech geek. He was excited to try a new reel-to-reel tape recorder for The Beatles’ gig. Now in his 70s, he revealed the existence of the tape for the performance’s 60th anniversary special on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row.
The early full-length recording is special because the band’s performance is not drowned out by the sheer force of Beatlmaniac’s screams. It was a unique concert because The Beatles performed for an almost entirely male audience. There are some cheers and screams, but it’s a virtually perfect recording. Bloomfield got a clear performance from the group, which wouldn’t have been possible the following year.
It’s blatantly obvious in the recording that, even then, The Beatles’ performances were fine-tuned. They’d honed their skills during their residency in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 1960s, playing extremely long sets every day. They were seasoned stage veterans by the time of their concert at Stowe.
They even played tracks off their debut album, Please Please Me, which they’d only released weeks prior. The band also kept the crowd going with R&B covers. The Beatles opened with their debut’s opening track “I Saw Her Standing There” and then Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.”
Why the earliest recording of The Beatles in concert is so important
The earliest full-length recording of The Beatles in concert is just as essential to The Beatles’ history as their first-ever recording.
It captures The Beatles as we’ve never seen them before, on the cusp of international fame. Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn couldn’t stress that enough. He said, “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.
“So here is an opportunity to hear them in the U.K., in an environment where they could be heard and where the tape actually does capture them properly, at a time when they can have banter with the audience as well. I think it’s an incredibly important recording, and I hope something good and constructive and creative eventually happens to it.”
The recording is also interesting because of the duality of it all. Here are The Beatles, working-class boys on the cusp of fame, playing for a room full of wealthy males and even taking requests. Within the next year, the band achieved worldwide fame, playing to massive crowds of screaming girls.
When Bloomfield revisited his school’s theatre on the Front Row special, he said he was embarrassed to have recorded The Beatles’ concert. However, he realized that seeing The Beatles changed his life. It was emotional for him to hear the recording for the first time in 60 years. Thankfully, he decided to tell someone about it. Otherwise, fans wouldn’t have known it existed.
