FEATURE:
She Loves You (P.S. We Love You)
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles play a full set for lucky pupils at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire on 4th April, 1963, where a tape of that set recorded by then-pupil John Bloomfield has been brought to public attention by broadcaster, writer, campaigner, journalist, and Beatles superfan, Samira Ahmed
Saluting Samira Ahmed’s Passion for The Beatles, and Her Remarkable Recent Discovery
_________
THERE is a lot to unpack here…
IN THIS PHOTO: Samira Ahmed photographed at her south-west London home for The Observer New Review in 2020/PHOTO CREDIT: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
so do bear with me! To start off, my love and respect for Samira Ahmed knows no bounds! She is a wonderful human and someone who actually helped me discover a lot about The Beatles - and I have been listening to their music for over thirty-five years. That is who we are here to talk about: both Ahmed and the legendary Liverpool group. If you have not heard the BBC Front Row from 3rd April, then do listen now, because it will not be online for long (but I hope it will transfer to Spotify where it can live on). It relates to the fact that Ahmed, for Front Row, visited Stowe boarding school in Buckinghamshire to mark sixty years (4th April, 1963) of The Beatles performed a gig there. Unexpectedly, Ahmed discovered that the earliest known full recording of the band performing live existed on tape! The hour-long, quarter-inch tape recording was created by John Bloomfield. He was fifteen at the time. The gig was in front of an almost all-male audience. That is interesting, as one associates the most ardent fans of The Beatles as being young women/girls. They helped bring the band to the fore and were the most ardent and passionate supporters. Ahmed and Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn are the only people to have heard the full recording. Part of that historic gig was played on the Front Row special. We owe Samira Ahmed so many thanks for helping bring this to international attention. I will expand on this Midas discovery in a bit…
Before I come to that, I want to start off with a bit of background. There is no denying the fact Ahmed is one of the biggest Beatles fans in the world! I know she has a special appreciation for George Harrison, but this is someone who has a fascination with and love of the band running through her blood and encoded into her DNA. Samira Ahmed has spoken about The Beatles through the wonderful podcast, I am the EggPod. Hosted by her friend Chris Shaw, she has discussed A Hard Day’s Night, Please Please Me, George Harrison, Yellow Submarine Songtrack, The Beatles Live at the BBC, in addition to celebrating I am the EggPod’s fifth anniversary (where, interestingly, she interviewed Chris Shaw!) back in January. She also helped pay tribute to Paul McCartney at 80 last year. She is one of the special guests for the inaugural I Am the EggPod Live on Saturday, 1st July, where she will speak from the rather lovely and palatial Opera Holland Park in a very nice part of London! I do hope that Chris Shaw asks his good friend about a find that, well, frankly, is the Beatles discovery of the century! Ahmed has helped unearth and spotlight a rare discovery that has delighted Beatles fans around the globe - and quite rightly confirmed her as a legend and one of the most important Beatles fans there is. On 4th April, Ahmed posted the following to her official website:
“It was sixty years ago today….
A spread from the Stowe School archive was laid out in the Headmaster’s Gothic Library when I arrived there on March 22nd, ready for me. Copies of the letters from Brian Epstein, photos and more. Anthony Wallersteiner and old Stoic John Bloomfield had agreed to spend the morning with me and producer Julian May for a special Front Row report marking the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ most unusual gig – the time they played a private boys’ boarding school.
PHOTO CREDIT: Samira Ahmed
My fascination with the intersection of popular culture and social change is the driving force behind my journalism. My partner had taken me for a visit to the school last summer and Anthony had given us a tour and told us about the concert. Seeing a blue plaque on the school theatre building marking the event set my spidey senses tingling. Not only did I love The Beatles, I knew there was a story about what that concert represented as a pivotal moment of transformation in British society and the uniqueness of that almost all male audience. What I didn’t know until a couple days before we arrived was that John might have a tape of the whole concert.
Last night’s Front Row special in which I revealed the existence of the earliest complete live recording of the Beatles in the UK was one of the most delightful stories I’ve ever worked on.
It’s all thanks to John Bloomfield’s self confessed technical nerdery in taping the concert on his new tape player that it exists. And thanks to his generosity and trust in me, that he told me about it.
He brought along an extract that we played through the stage PA system turned up as loud as possible to match the experience he’d had back in 1963. It was emotional for all us, including two young A level music students who came along to listen. It was like time travel. The Front Row listen hopefully gives a sense of that”.
Every year sees something Beatles-related - in spite of the fact the band broke up over fifty years ago. If we do not get an album anniversary reissue – I wonder which one Giles Martin will release next? -, then it is a book, or something magnificent like Chris Shaw’s upcoming Live EggPod bonanza (where Beatles historian and leading expert Mark Lewisohn is one of the special guests). In November, 2021, Samira Ahmed spoke with Paul McCartney at London’s Southbank Centre in promotion of his lyrics book. She also spoke to Chris Shaw about that experience. (There is an unofficial video of the Ahmed/McCartney q&a). Could she have imagined that, just over a year later, she would bring us the news of this live recording of huge cultural significance?! I hope that this tape is restored and either stored in Liverpool in a museum or even kept behind glass at The British Museum in London, such is its importance! This is the earliest full set on tape from a band that would change popular culture and the world! Writing for The Observer yesterday, this is what Ahmed noted:
“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.
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles (Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) mingle with pupils at Stowe before their concert on 4th April, 1963/PHOTO CREDIT: Dezo Hoffmann
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.
IN THIS PHOTO: Stowe School in Buckinghamshire/PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Draisey/Alamy
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.
John Lennon’s saucy jokes and voices, Paul McCartney’s polite thanks… How much did the boys love Ringo, shouting out his name
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”.
I am not sure what happens next. In Ahmed’s article, she noted how The Beatles interacted with those posh boarding school pupils the same way they would have in Hamburg where they were playing the club circuit. Not to say they were swearing at kids and John Lennon was responding to heckles, as he did at The Star-Club! The Beatles played that German club in 1962, so they would have been more accustomed to crowds they got there; same with The Cavern in Liverpool. There were no heirs and graces. The lads were professional and funny. But it showed how they could transition between vastly different environments and stages and be as extraordinary and faultless as they were right up until 1966. Understandably, Samira Ahmed is immensely proud of this scoop (as she continued in that Observer article):
“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”.
I am not sure what happens when it comes to that tape and its restoration. Of course, it is fragile and precious, so making sure it is restored carefully and preserved is of the utmost importance. There is going to be those asking for it to be transferred to a range of physical formats (including vinyl and cassette). Maybe a Spotify and Apple transfer. We have to also credit to John Bloomfield (who is now seventy-five). To have the foresight to have kept this all these years, knowing that it would be treasured. We are very lucky that this mind-blowing discovery will be introduced to new generations!
That is the thing. The Beatles may have started releasing albums in the 1960s, but they are still enormously popular today. Still inspiring artists and finding new listeners. I think one thing that strikes me about Samira Ahmed is how much she loves those early years of The Beatles’ career. She has talked about studio albums (on I Am the EggPod) that were released in 1963 (Please Please Me), and 1964 (A Hard Day’s Night). When covering The Beatles’ Live at the BBC album, remember that those recordings were captured between 1963 to 1965. From her discussions around Black R&B groups and their sonic and vocal influence on Please Please Me, to the female fans who helped make the band and are often written off and ignored by history, to the way she passionately and emotionally bonded with songs on that BBC live album, you can tell she has a deep fascination and adoration for that period between 1963 and 1965. It is no surprise that she was compelled to mark sixty years of The Beatles playing at a boarding school. To discover that there was a cassette of a full set and that it is in working order is something that goes down as one of the greatest bits of Beatles news ever! We owe eternal thanks to Samira Ahmed for what she has helped make widely known. I have speculated how it would be great if Ahmed wrote a book about the band. Maybe Samira Ahmed: The Beatles and Me, or I’m Happy Just to Dance with You (just spit-balling here!), she has this life-long love for them. This is a nice extra chapter that she could add! To find that tape and play some of it out is insane and wonderful at the same time. It is clear that she loves The Beatles. And, in turns…
WE love her for it!