What’s on the set list? Why did he only tell you about the tape now after 60 years? Two of the questions I’ve been bombarded with since I made public the existence of an almost complete concert recording of the Beatles on the cusp of their great breakout.
There’s a third question of my own: why has the news that 15-year-old John Bloomfield made and kept a tape recording of the Beatles playing at Stowe boarding school in Buckinghamshire on 4 April 1963 gladdened our hearts quite so much? Answers to all three lie ahead.
I’ve long felt a bit embarrassed about the fetishisation of every tiny piece of Beatles archive footage as they have emerged, treated like religious relics. When I pitched my story reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the Beatles at Stowe to my Front Row editor, there was no suspicion of a tape.
My idea came from a chance visit last summer. I saw the blue plaque commemorating the gig on the school’s Roxburgh Hall theatre and knew there was a story in that night’s unique collision of class and an all-male teenage audience. Who knows how many young male hearts beat a little faster that night as Ringo Starr sang Boys?
We fixed on a date to go to Stowe in late March, before the Easter holidays. The headmaster, Anthony Wallersteiner, promised to round up any of the diminishing number of old boys he could. Bloomfield, the show’s stage manager, was the only one who could make it, and Wallersteiner, in a memorable email dated 3 March, introduced us, observing: “There was a rumour that one of the boys ran a wire from a microphone to a reel-to-reel tape recording under the stage. Is this a Stowe myth?”
The reply came back from John: “Guilty as charged, ’twas I. Not under the stage, but right in front of it. I will see if I can find the tape and if it is still usable.”
On 22 March, producer Julian May and I turned up to record at Stowe, not knowing if Bloomfield had managed to find the tape. He had. It turns out he’d felt embarrassed too. A self-confessed tech head, trying out his new Butoba MT5 recorder, taking a dozen D-cell batteries costing 10 old pence each, he’d regarded it merely as a poor quality amateur recording of songs better captured in official releases.
We played the extract he’d brought on his laptop of the start of the gig on the original stage. Bloomfield guided us to crank up the sound louder, to replicate the original bone-shaking experience and I felt my whole body vibrate with the sheer raw power of the Beatles. It was exciting, but also poignant, sharing that moment with Bloomfield, thinking of his school friends. Some are dead and some are living.
The journalist in me needed to know exactly what we were dealing with, and, a couple of days later, I suggested that Bloomfield play the entire tape to me and Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn via a video call. We sat grinning, but both also making careful notes: on the banter – John Lennon’s saucy jokes and voices, on Paul McCartney’s polite thanks and apology for the fact that they were used to playing two half-hour sets. How much did the boys love Ringo, shouting out his name.
Lewisohn pointed out their improvised song order and choices because George Harrison had lost his voice. The few girls – daughters of staff members – at the back were screaming. At the point I realised the band were taking requests shouted out in cut-glass accents, as the uptight pupils threw off their inhibitions, I felt my spine tingling. This was proper time travel. And the track listing was a fascinating interweaving of the new Lennon and McCartney partnership in songs from their brand-new Please Please Me album and their old classic R&B live act, including I Just Don’t Understand and Matchbox.
The tape runs out after 22 tracks, but a fragment of a set list written down from memory by a fellow Stoic suggests Sweet Little Sixteen and Long Tall Sally may have completed a tally of 24.
There’s reasonable speculation from the boys who were there that the Beatles were on speed. It must have been like a hurricane hitting that school. They wolfed down chicken and chips in the school tuck shop and, on the walk back to the car, Starr suggested a quick fumble in the bushes with one of the girls (politely declined). Official photos show the Beatles posing in front of what Lennon dubbed the “corned beef” pillars in the Marble Hall and fooling around with squash racquets in Bloomfield’s rather grotty study room. They never appear awed; only joyful and relaxed.
After my report went out on last Monday’s Front Row, the comment that nails why this tape matters came from a BBC colleague, producer Kevin Core – perhaps not coincidentally, from Merseyside. “We know what the Beatles were like in the Cavern, and in Hamburg clubs, but we didn’t know what they were like in an upper-class setting in front of 500 public-school boys. Turns out – they were exactly the same.”
As for the tape – talks are underway to get it cleaned up and given a permanent home in a national cultural institution. Bloomfield feels strongly that it should not end up, as so many Beatles relics have, in the vault of a private individual. And, since Peter Jackson’s audio restoration for The Beatles: Get Back series, there are cautious hopes for cleaning up what’s been captured on that old magnetic tape.
So while scholars and hardcore fans may want to dive into the minutiae, there is a simpler reason that the Stowe tape is the loveliest scoop of my career. At a time when social divisions are deepening, perhaps the nostalgia we feel, whether we were alive then or not, is for that lost moment when four Liverpool boys convinced us that it might all be changing for good.
• Samira Ahmed is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row
• This article was amended on 9 April 2023. The tape recorder used to record the Beatles at Stowe was a Butoba BT5, rather than a Nagra III as an earlier version said.
