The latest work from the HMC label, "Bournemouth 1963," is attracting attention from Beatles collectors all over the world. Needless to say, the Bournemouth performance was recorded from a lossless master, not from YOUTUBE. The Birmingham Stowe School performance is HMC's own supplementary revised version.
The long-awaited new work "Bournemouth 1963" from the overseas Beatles label HMC is finally here! This two-CD set contains four precious live recordings from 1963, the year the Beatlemania phenomenon took place in the UK. Disc 1 features all 10 songs from the Bournemouth performance in August 1963 for the first time. Recorded by theater chief engineer Tom Mellor on August 21 at the Goumont Cinema from six consecutive nights of performances from August 19 to 24, this is the oldest historical live recording of the complete Beatles performance in 1963. The original 1/4-inch reel tape was auctioned in 1998 and purchased by Apple, and the existence of the rumored live performance, which had been known in the past when parts of it were broadcast on BBC Radio, is finally recorded in its entirety. This is a historic new live recording that captures the sincere performance of the early Beatles, including "Chains" and "Baby It's You" performed with a set list unique to that time, as well as "She Loves You" just before the single was released. The next two songs performed at EMI House in London on April 5, 1963 are precious performances shown at the commemorative party for the album "Please Please Me" receiving a silver disc. And the five songs that appeared for the first time from the performance in Walthamstow, a suburb of London on May 24, 1963 are fully recorded. Although only excerpts have been released so far, this is the first time that the existing recordings are fully recorded, including the two songs with Roy Orbison, who performed with them. Disc 2 contains the recently unearthed performance at Birmingham Stow School on April 4, 1963. The existence of the sound source was revealed on BBC radio in 2023, and then it was released at the British Library, where it was a complete recording of the precious live sound source that became a hot topic. It is a restored and revised version that adds two songs that were actually performed but not recorded at the end of the incomplete recording, such as pitch correction, noise removal, and bass reinforcement, from the original sound source, and is the best sound source with the most improved sound quality at present. This is the latest work from the HMC label, which is a must-have item for collectors, including the Beatles' first appearance sound source in early 1963!
CD Disc 1 - Bournemouth, 23 August 1963 01. Roll Over Beethoven 02. Thank You Girl 03. Chains 04. From Me To You 05. A Taste Of Honey 06. I Saw Her Standing There 07. Baby It's You 08. Boys 09. She Loves You 10. Twist And Shout E.M.I. House, London, 5 April 1963 11. from Me To You 12. Please Please Me Walthamstow, 24 May 1963 13. Some Other Guy 14. Thank You Girl 15. Please Please Me 16. I Saw Her Standing There 17. from Me To You Roy Orbison at Walthamstow 18. Running Scared 19. In Dreams
CD Disc 2 - Stowe School, Buckingham, 4 April 1963 01. I Saw Here Standing There 02. Too Much Monkey Business 03. Love Me Do 04. Some Other Guy 05. Misery 06. I Just Don't Understand 07. A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues 08. Boys 09. Matchbox 10. from Us To You 11. Thank You Girl 12. Memphis Tennessee 13. A Taste Of Honey 14. Twist And Shout 15. Anna 16. Please Please Me 17. Hippy Hippy Shake 18. Talking About You 19. Missery 20. Til There Was You 21. Money * 22. I Saw Her Standing There * 23. Sweet Little Sixteen 24. Long Tall Sally * Incomplete
All CD's in Mono! Stowe School from a new source tape! You can find this set on various Marketplaces now.
You can listen to 46 minutes of this performance below:
Here's something that's pretty amazing, if you're a Beatles fan. I'm writing this in December 2023. Back in September, there were some articles in the mainstream media about a recently discovered bootleg recording of a 1963 Beatles concert at the Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, Britain. Here's one such article. I suggest you read it to be familiar with what I'm talking about:
The Beatles Stowe School Concert Is Unlike Any Other Show in History (thedailybeast.com)
I'll explain more about the story behind this concert and how it got recorded in a bit. But first, I want to say that I tracked down that recording after reading about it, and I have to admit I was pretty disappointed, due to poor sound quality. Amongst many other problems, the vocals were so low that they often couldn't be heard at all. I tried my best to fix things with my limited ability using the artificial intelligence based audio editing programs that have come out in recent years, but the recording was too poor to be salvageable. I didn't even bother keeping a copy of the concert in my music collection, because it wasn't worth hearing for me.
Or so I thought. Enter Lord Reith. He's someone who has been editing and improving Beatles recordings for years. I don't know if he's a magician or what, but what he did with this Stowe School bootleg is nothing short of miraculous! There are still some problems, which I will get to in a bit, but he's completely transformed the sound quality, making it almost sound as good as some soundboard recordings. In particular, he did wonders to make the vocals audible. So, in my opinion, this has gone from not worth listening to more than once (if that) to being one of the most interesting and listenable live Beatles recordings, period. If you're a fan, and you can tolerate some sound quality issues, definitely give this a listen.
Now, let me explain a bit more about what this concert is and why it's so unique. Again, I highly recommend you read the above newspaper article, but in case you don't, here's a short summary. At the time of this concert, the Beatles were right on the cusp of being big stars in Britain, but they weren't quite there yet. They'd released their first single, "Love Me Do," in late 1962. It made the Top Twenty in Britain, which was a good start. Then, in January 1963, they released the single "Please Please Me." It reached Number One in most British charts. In late March 1963, they released their first album, also called "Please Please Me." That would go on to be a huge hit, staying in the Top Ten of the charts for over a year, which would set a record for the next fifty years. Then, only one week after this concert, the single "From Me to You" would be released, and that would be another Number One hit in Britain.
So, mere weeks after this concert, Beatlemania hit Britain in a big way, just as it would hit the U.S. in early 1964. From that point on, pretty much all Beatles concerts would be short, a half an hour or less, and so filled with screams from overexcited girls that one couldn't really hear the music. If you're heard live Beatles recordings, then you know it's usually a pretty rough listening experience, due to all that screaming and cheering.
Previously, the Beatles had spent a couple of years in Hamburg, Germany, honing their music skills by playing in small clubs. There are some rough live recordings from that, and they're very interesting, but they consisted almost entirely of cover songs.
This recording is unique, however, in part because the Stowe School is very unusual. In 1963, it was only for boys aged 13 to 18. As you can see from this photo, it was only for the children of the elite. It looks less like a high school and more like a palace! The Beatles were booked to perform there months before the concert date, when their fame was a lot less. But they upheld their agreement and played there in April 1963 anyway. Not only that, but they played for over an hour, instead of the mere half hour or less they were already doing for screaming fans in other shows.
But what's really great is, because the audience considered entirely of boys, and well-behaved upper class boys, no less, there was no screaming. According to articles I read, most of the boys in the audience hadn't even heard of the Beatles yet, so they weren't swept up in any hysteria. The Beatles played virtually all the songs from the "Please Please Me" album, plus "From Me to You" and its B-side "Thank You Girl," despite the fact those last two songs still hadn't been released. Yet they also played a bunch of cover songs that they'd done in Hamburg. This is probably the last time most of those covers were played by them in concert, as they switched to doing very short concerts consisting entirely of their best known songs. So this is the one and only concert recording with a mix of the "old" Beatles of Hamburg cover versions and the "new" Beatles with their remarkable original songs. How lucky we are that one of the boys in the audience snuck in a tape recorder and recorded it.
So that's the good news. The bad news is, even after Lord Reith's miraculous transformation of the recording, there still are sound quality issues. The biggest problem is the banter between songs. There was a lot banter, between almost all the songs. Unfortunately, the recording of those bits were very quiet, way more quiet than the music. So I suspect there just wasn't much there on the recording for Lord Reith to work with. I took his version, with the banter way down low, and boosted the volume of those bits so the banter can be clearly heard. But unfortunately, all that means in that quiet jibber jabber is now louder jibber jabber. I've included a couple of extra text files. One of them is a list of all the changes Lord Reith made to make this listenable. The other is a transcript of what he and other die-hard Beatles fans have managed to figure out from the banter. If you read that as you listen, you can catch most of it. But otherwise, the talking is pretty hard to understand, other than the occasional phrase.
Due to this seemingly unfixable problem, I'm posting two versions of this album. One contains the banter and the songs, and the other one contains just the songs. I much, much prefer the music only version. The banter is interesting to hear once or twice, but beyond that, it drags down the overall recording. So maybe you'll want to download both, and listen to one version and then the other.
There's one other big problem. The tape in the tape recorder only lasted for about sixty minutes. The recorder was up at the stage and the boy who recorded it was sitting in the audience, so when the tape ran out, there was no way for him to flip it over and keep recording. Thus, the end of a second version of "I Saw Her Standing There" was cut off, plus all of the last two songs, "Sweet Little Sixteen" and "Long Tall Sally." Most of the second version of "I Saw Her Standing There" survived, and luckily it happened to be the only song played twice. So I patched in the ending from the first version earlier in the show. But the last two songs are lost.
And there's one more lost song. Right before that second version of "I Saw Her Standing There," the Beatles played "Money (That's What I Want)." Unfortunately, there's only about twenty seconds of this on the recording, and then it gets replaced by the hit version of "Surfin' Bird" by the Trashmen! Probably what happened was that the boy who recorded it accidentally recorded that song off the radio over the Beatles concert. I removed the snippet of "Money" and the little bit of banter before it, because it's frustrating to get only such a short part of that.
Furthermore, note that even after all of Lord Reith's edits, there were still some problems with the vocals. I used UVR5 to boost all the vocals a bit. I think that helped to make the singing easier to hear. But some songs are better than others. For "Matchbox" in particular, only bits and pieces of the lead vocals can be heard. I figure that's because that song was sung by Ringo Starr, the drummer, and maybe he was sitting back and too busy with drumming to keep his mouth near the microphone all the time. (That reminds me: there are no lead vocals from George Harrison because he was recovering from a cold.)
If you want to know even more about this remarkable concert, I recommend this link:
The Beatles concert at Roxburgh Hall, Stowe School in Buckingham on Apr 4, 1963 (the-paulmccartney-project.com)
It includes lots of great photos and stories. You can learn the whole story of how this bootleg came to be recorded and then rediscovered decades later. It's really interesting stuff, if you're a Beatles fan. That also includes a transcript of the banter between songs.
Here's the track list to the version that includes the banter. This version is 58 minutes long.
01 talk (Beatles) 02 I Saw Her Standing There (Beatles) 03 Too Much Monkey Business (Beatles) 04 talk (Beatles) 05 Love Me Do (Beatles) 06 talk (Beatles) 07 Some Other Guy (Beatles) 08 talk (Beatles) 09 Misery (Beatles) 10 talk (Beatles) 11 I Just Don't Understand (Beatles) 12 talk (Beatles) 13 A Shot of Rhythm and Blues (Beatles) 14 talk (Beatles) 15 Boys (Beatles) 16 talk (Beatles) 17 Matchbox (Beatles) 18 talk (Beatles) 19 From Me to You (Beatles) 20 talk (Beatles) 21 Thank You Girl (Beatles) 22 talk (Beatles) 23 Memphis, Tennessee (Beatles) 24 talk (Beatles) 25 A Taste of Honey (Beatles) 26 talk (Beatles) 27 Twist and Shout (Beatles) 28 talk (Beatles) 29 Anna [Go to Him] (Beatles) 30 talk (Beatles) 31 Please Please Me (Beatles) 32 talk (Beatles) 33 The Hippy Hippy Shake (Beatles) 34 talk (Beatles) 35 I'm Talking about You (Beatles) 36 talk (Beatles) 37 Ask Me Why (Beatles) 38 talk (Beatles) 39 Till There Was You (Beatles) 40 talk (Beatles) 41 I Saw Her Standing There [Edit] (Beatles)
And here's the link to the version with the banter: NOTE: The download link has been removed due to a copyright issue, sorry. But check the comments below. Here's the track list for the version with only the music. This version is 50 minutes long, eight minutes shorter than the other version.
01 I Saw Her Standing There (Beatles) 02 Too Much Monkey Business (Beatles) 03 Love Me Do (Beatles) 04 Some Other Guy (Beatles) 05 Misery (Beatles) 06 I Just Don't Understand (Beatles) 07 A Shot of Rhythm and Blues (Beatles) 08 Boys (Beatles) 09 Matchbox (Beatles) 10 From Me to You (Beatles) 11 Thank You Girl (Beatles) 12 Memphis, Tennessee (Beatles) 13 A Taste of Honey (Beatles) 14 Twist and Shout (Beatles) 15 Anna [Go to Him] (Beatles) 16 Please Please Me (Beatles) 17 The Hippy Hippy Shake (Beatles) 18 I'm Talking about You (Beatles) 19 Ask Me Why (Beatles) 20 Till There Was You (Beatles) 21 I Saw Her Standing There [Edit] (Beatles)
Here's the link to the version with no banter, and only songs. NOTE: The download link has been removed due to a copyright issue, sorry. But, again, check the comments below. Again, especially if you're not a die-hard fan, I recommend just getting the music only version. For the cover photo, I used one of the photos from this exact concert and colorized it, using the Palette program. You can see a larger and uncropped version of the original black and white photo in one of the above article links.
