A couple of decades ago I remember my dear uncle Patrick telling me after lunch on Christmas day about the time the Beatles came to his school and played a gig just before they got famous.
I thought at the time that maybe the excitement of Christmas and too many shandys might have clouded his memory and as this was still the time before the interwebmindfuck there was no real way to verify what i thought was his own personal fantasy.
That was until, this turned up in the Guardian the week before last.
Please Please Us: Lost tape of Beatles school gig could be saved for the nation
Sixty years ago, a little-known Liverpudlian band took to the stage at Stowe school in Buckinghamshire
It was a sweet slice of cultural history and, at the same time, evidence of an unlikely clash of English social classes. The discovery of a tape recording of an earlyBeatlesconcert made in 1963 at a Buckinghamshire public school last week has astonished music experts and fans alike.
And now the crackling, hissing 60-year-old tape, complete with audible banter from the Fab Four, is to be restored for wider listening, according to theBBCjournalist who uncovered the story, Samira Ahmed. The former student who made the tape, John Bloomfield, hopes to have it enhanced with the same kind of technology that has recently improved other early Beatles demo tapes and first studio takes.
“Talks are under way to get [the tape] cleaned up and for a permanent home in a national cultural institution,” Ahmed has told theObserver. “John feels strongly that it should not end up, as so many Beatles relics have, in the vault of a private individual.”
Bloomfield was the teenage stage manager for the concert in the Stowe school theatre on 4 April and he had the foresight to place a microphone at the front of the stage, that fed into his new Butoba MT5 recording machine. Fearing later that its poor quality made it worthless, he simply stored it away in his home while the band’s worldwide fame grew and grew, enduring even now, more than half a century after they last played together in public.
You can read the rest of the article at
A quick email to the village of Northchapel West Sussex to confirm….
Oh yes……. there’s another fun music link before we move on.. Who lives in Northchapel?
None other than Pete Bellotte .. Mr Moroder’s partner in crime on a number of productions including on this
Bellotte, Summer, Moroder
Anyway, I digress.
Not only did he see the gig, he also organised it with his then mate John Bloomfield , and , even managed to get two sets of full autographs that he still regrets giving away in the 1970’s!