The Beatles At Stowe School April 4, 1963 and 50 similar items

The Beatles At Stowe School April 4, 1963 [2-CD] FULL SHOW!! DISC ONE - Original Tape DISC TWO - Enhanced Using AI+ The earliest known full recording of The Beatles playing a live concert in the UK, at the point they were becoming the biggest band in the nation, was discovered in early 2023, almost exactly sixty years after it was made. The hour-long quarter-inch tape recording was made by 15-year-old John Bloomfield at Stowe boarding school in Buckinghamshire on 4 April 1963 when the band played a concert at the school's theatre. It was a unique Beatles gig, performed in front of an almost entirely male audience. And crucially, despite loud cheers and some screaming, the tape is not drowned out by the audience reaction. It captures the appeal of The Beatles' tightly-honed live act, 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. They kicked off with the album's opening track I Saw Her Standing There and then segued into Chuck Berry's Too Much Monkey Business. The band arrived late from a recording at the BBC Paris Studios and, used to playing two half-hour sets, rattled through more than 22 songs in an hour. Remarkably, they are heard 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 huge 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 Fab Four from the back. "It wasn't until they started playing that we heard the screaming, and we realized we were in the middle of Beatlemania," Bloomfield said. "It was just something we'd never even vaguely experienced." Bloomfield has kept the recording for all these years, but had never publicly revealed its existence until now. He said he was embarrassed to have made the tape, but seeing the Beatles had changed his life and he found it emotional listening to it again, all these years later. Now, for the first time in over sixty years, you can experience what it was like to spend an exciting hour in concert WITH THE BEATLES.