The Earliest Live Recording Of The Beatles Has Been Discovered

John Bloomfield, a man who attended the Stowe boarding school in Buckinghamshire when he was 15, has revealed the earliest live recording of The Beatles, 60 years after he made the tape in 1963.

The discovery of the tape was made when BBC journalist Samira Ahmed visited Stowe to make a Radio 4 Front Row special about the 60th anniversary of the concert.

“It was a unique Beatles gig, performed in front of an almost entirely male audience,” Ahmed wrote about the time capsule. “And crucially, despite loud cheers and some screaming, the tape is not drowned out by the audience reaction.”

The tape contains a performance of Please Please Me, released just two weeks before the gig. The Beatles also played I Saw Her Standing There before ripping into Chuck Berry’s Too Much Monkey Business. 

As of this week, Ahmed, The Beatles historian Mark Lewisholm and Bloomfield are the only ones who have heard the tape. However, a segment of the cassette premiered on Front Row on Monday, 3 April. You can listen to a snippet of the very exciting discovery here.

“I would say I grew up at that very instant," Bloomfield said of the concert’s impact on his life. "It sounds a bit of an exaggeration, but I realised this was something from a different planet."

Lewisholm added, “I think it's an incredibly important recording, and I hope something good and constructive and creative eventually happens to it.

"I didn't even know this tape existed until you told me about it, and I think I had to pick myself up off the floor."

Last September, photographer and lawyer Alper Yesiltas used AI technology to create portraits of famous dead musicians that show what they would look like if they were still alive today, including a portrait image of John Lennon.

Discussing the project, Yesiltas offered, "With the development of AI technology, I've been excited for a while, thinking that 'anything imaginable can be shown in reality, when I started tinkering with technology, I saw what I could do and thought about what would make me the happiest. I wanted to see some of the people I missed again in front of me, and that's how this project emerged.”

Under his image of John Lennon, Yesiltas wrote the caption, "I wish he hadn't been in New York that day."