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From: tonyquin@sixpints.demon.co.uk (Tony Quinn)
Subject: The Beatles At The Beeb
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 1995 00:02:14 +0000
Newsgroups: rec.music.beatles

[This article originally appeared in 'AUDIO MEDIA' February 1995, a UK trade magazine. I typed it in for those not in the business so apologies for typos.]

THE BEATLES LIVE AT THE BBC - COMPILING THE 'LOST' TAPES

Down in the BBC vaults, we were told, they had stumbled upon golden tapes containing long lost recordings of the Beatles' radio performances. It was hailed as the greatest and most fortuitous discovery since the unearthing of Tutankhamun's tomb, but then RICHARD BUSKIN,intrepid reporter, got on the case and spoke to BBC Radio producer Kevin Howlett and Abbey Road Studios engineer, Peter Mew. The truth, he learned, differed somewhat from the hype.

Well, well, well, here we go again! What is it about publicity and press hacks that compels them, every timesome legendary, previously-unreleased material is unleashed on the general public, to summon up images of said tapes being discovered down in the vaults? For one thing, just how many record companies do, in fact, have these mysterious - and, no doubt, cobweb-infested - underground storage chambers; and secondly, are we to assume that there are regularly exploratory expeditions undertaken in order to seek out even more of this hidden treasure? You can just imagine the scene..... Indiana Jones, eat your heart out!

Indeed, in the case of the recently released Beatles radio sessions, we were informed by news reports on the BBC itself that the vaults in which the tapes were actually 'dust-encrusted', which doesn't say too much for the work of the BBC archivists. Furthermore the tapes were miraculously all found to be in pristine condition, and they contained songs which nobody could recall the Beatles ever performing. Well, to all this I will say just one thing - and, being my usual diplomatic self, I will do so in a typically restrained manner - what a pile of tosh.

Of the 275 Beatles recordings broadcast by the BBC between March 8, 1962 and June 7, 1965, various were in fact re-broadcast by the network in a two hour special entitled The Beatles At The Beeb in 1982. A three hour version was subsequently syndicated in other countries, and in 1988, there was a series of 14 half hour shows entitled The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes. What is more, the fans have had bootleg recordings of many of these sessions since the early 1970's. during the past year, an Italian company has even put out a nine CD boxed set containing every single number the band committed to tape in the BBC studios. The only reason for the delay was the protracted legal wrangling between the BBC, EMI Records (to whom the Beatles were contracted from 1962 onwards), and the group's own company Apple Corp. So let's not talk about the mass rediscovery of long lost masters.

DISCOVERING THE TOMB

Kevin Howlett, a senior producer at BBC Radio 1, wrote the sleeve notes for the new album, The Beatles, Live At The BBC, having previously re-engineered - and acted as a conduit in the location of - much of the material that was used for the 1982 and 1988 re-broadcasts.

"At the press launch for the album, the first question I was asked was whether it was like discovering Tutankhamen's tomb," he says. "So I replied that the material was very exciting and that I therefore suppose you could use that analogy if you want to. That was a mistake, however, because the reporter then quoted me as asserting, 'it was like discovering Tutankhamun's tomb!' I should have been wise to his little ploy, because in truth I feel that the material is much more a time capsule that enables you to travel back and rediscover where BBC Radio was at in the mid 1960's.

Such is the case for Howlett himself whose own time at the beeb commenced quite a few years later. "I was just a child listening at home to this stuff - a beatle baby," he says. Nevertheless, while researching the sessions he did talk to numerous people who had worked on them, and from what they said, he deduced that, during the early to mid 60's, therehad actually been a conscious decision among the BBc hierarchy to dispose of all the material.

"I spoke to Jeff Griffin who was here at the BBC, and he recalled a particular Head Of Department saying, 'This material is taking up too much room. we've got to get rid of it!' Today that may seem ludicrous, especially as Radio 1 has its own archive and we hang on to all our sessions. In fairness, there was so much live recording done in those days - because there weren't all that many records being played - that if they had kept absolutely everything, it would have got completely out of control. I mean. you didn't really need to keep the Northern Dance Orchestra performing Singing The Blues for the fifteenth time or whatever.

"On the other hand, The Beatles had certainly become a phenomenon within a very short space of time, and so you would have though that somebody would have though that somebody would have considered the recordings worth hanging onto for posterity. There again, I've also heard that the contracts made with performing artists back then contained a clause stating that session tapes should be destroyed after three months; possibly a Musicians Union rule that its members would then be required to return and make further recordings.

Nevertheless in spite of all the rules and regulations, some employees fortunately did have the foresight todisregard them, albeit that the task of tracking down and collating these remnants was anything but straightforward for Howlett and his colleagues. The beeb, you see, is a large corporate body with numerous arms that reach out to both the domestic and overseas markets, and as a result, it has several different archives in a variety of locations.

BACK TO THE ARCHIVE

"Over the years, it's been a process of putting the Beatles archive back together really, as more and more stuff has come to light," says Howlett. "For the series The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes, which included a lot of speech interviews from the timew as well as the tracks, we turned up quite a few things. One of the most exciting finds came from the BBC Transcription Department, which was originally set up to distribute programmes to far flung corners of the British Empire."

During the 1960's, there was a radio show called Top Of The Pops - not to be confused with the television programme of the same name - hosted by Brian Matthew. This fitted onto two sides of a long playing disc and it featured Matthew presenting session tracks that had been recorded for various BBC programmes by groups such as the Hollie, The Swinging Blue Jeans.... and The Beatles.

"The transcription discs were utilised as the source for some of the 1964 material on the Live At The BBC album," explains Howlett. "On 'Things We Said Today', for instance, you can hear Brian Matthew voicing-over some sort of introduction, and that's actually taken from a Top Of The Pops disc, because the original version without the voice-over doesn't exist.

"There can be no doubt that the shows were well recorded at the time. So it's just a question as to how well the material has lasted over the years and in what form. I can remeber George Martin (the album's Executive Producer) saying to me that a disc is quite a good storage medium and that he was quite happy to master from it. In fact when I was working on a series called Paul Simon's Songbook a few years ago I talked to (producer) Roy Halee about his re-mastering of the Simon and Garfunkel material and how the original master tapes were in a bad condition, having been played over and over again and not looked after. he was appalled at the state they were in, and said, 'if only they could find me a decent mintcopy of 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', at least I would be able to master from that!"

So much for disc storage, yet within the BBC Transcription Department there is also a tape library, and it is here that the most exciting find was made for the 1988 series The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes. "We came across two ten-inch reels with 'The Beatles' on the spine," recalls Howlett. "One of these was a half-hour reel featuring them larking around for the '65 Christmas Show, (an edition of Saturday Club on which the group did not perform any songs). They were being interviewed by Brian Matthew and doing a send up of (the then influential TV pop show) Juke Box Jury, and obviously another version was eventually edited down from this.

"At the same time, the other half-hour reel was similar in that it had been left running while the session was in process, but it also included them performing 'I Feel Fine' and 'She's A Woman'. It had false starts, takes which broke down half-way through, and talkback between the group and the control room. It was fascinating, and that was quite a find, because it's sort of a pre-master really. From it, a master would have been made - a track would have been dubbed down, edited or whatever".

It's wierd how some things turn up. For instance, I've done a programme about the Rolling Stones' work at the Beeb. Some of their sessions are still missing, but one of those that is still around is probably the most interseting of all. In 1964, they performed tracks in front of a live audience that they never recorded for Decca. it was an experimantel stereo broadcast for the BBC, whereby they would broadcast one side of the stereo on the radio and the other side on the television (ie. stereophony). Then there were no television programmes in the early morning, and so they broadcast one side of the stereo on TV only and you would have to position your radio and your TV to get the stereo image! Now, that tape survived because it was of interest technically. You know, some engineer kept it because it was one of the first stereo broadcasts and not particularly because it featured the Rolling Stones".

ALTERNATIVE SOURCES

Meanwhile, with regard to The Beatles' radio performances, contact with the original session producers yielded some more tapes, but there were still quite a few gaps to be filled. It was for this reason that contact also had to be made with some.... ahem, 'alternative sources'. Indeed, since the transmission of the 1988 series, the most recent and valuable discovery has been a recording that a member of the public made off his radio back on January 26, 1963. Now it should be pointed out that this kind of practice was, of course, highly illegal, but in the case of The Beatles sessions, the BBC have had to behavein a manner which could more aptly be described as bloody grateful rather than terribly annoyed, for it is thanks to some eager listeners - and not the hallowed vaults - that certain lost gems have been retreived.

"The 1988 radio series was virtually completed just before it went out on the air", says Howlett, "but then when it did go out, some people phoned up and said that they has more tapes. Out of all of them one appeared to actually have some stuff that we didn't have, recorded all those years ago on his little Grundig. While it was too late for the series, I nevertheless kept his letter on file and got back in touch with him when this album project was imminent. he journeyed down to London with his five-inch reels, we went through them, and that's how 'Keep Your Hands Off My Baby' appeared on the album".

Certainly, a good number of shows were originally broadcast by the BBC in what was then known as VHF, and so, if someone had a half-decent domestic tape recorder and took a direct feed from his radio, the result of his or her endeavours could well be usable, especially with the digital technology now available to clean up such recordings. Peter Mew has been utilising the SonicSolutions computer enhancement system for the past 5 years at Abbey Road. He first became involved in the Beatles project when work on the album started in earnest around the middle of 1992.

SONIC ENHANCEMENT

"After George Martin had chosen the tracks that would go on the record, they were passed over to me for de-noising, EQing, and all the rest of it," he says. "Over the peiod of two and a half years, the album went through various changes - running order changes, title changes and things like that. At each stage I had to re-edit and make adjustments, so that it still sounded OK. In fact, overall it must have gone through seven different versions, and so I can now sing almost every song off by heart!

The masters that the BBC had were in pretty reasonable shape, and they therefore needed much the same treatment that old studio tapes would need. From there, however, things went down the scale in terms of sound quality and some items required a lot more work. Coming from so many different sources, each track had its own problems, and so it wasn't like a normal studio job where you had a number of studio reductions which basically required noise reduction. Everything had to be approached as a separate entity, and then, having done that, it was a matter of trying to get continuity of sound, and that worked in some cases and probably not in others!"

Undoubtedly, the greatest attraction of the 56 song Live At The BBC album is the 30 numbers which the band never recorded; mostly old rock'n'roll covers from thier Hamburg and Cavern Club days, as well as a few contemporary hits and even one of their own compositions, 'I'll Be On My Way', which was a hit for Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas. Again, as with Little Eva's 'Keep Your Hands Off My Baby', several of these performances returned the BBC's way courtesy of private recordings, yet in a good number of cases they also came from the Transcription Library at Kensington House, but from Bush House, where the World Service programmes are broadcast.

"The show, Pop Go The Beatles, was broadcast in the summer of 1963 on the domestic service," explains Kevin Howlett. "It featured a guest group and and a presenter and The Beatles reading requests, but it was then re-made for the BBC World Service and put out in '64 featuring just the songs and an announcer, and so that material went over to Bush House. Now, somebody over there made a tape of the more unusual songs, and due to this I was able to get hold of some of the most interesting tracks".

Still, there are half a dozen Beatles performances of 'unreleased' numbers which George Martin deemed as unsuitable for the album: Roy Orbisin's 'Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream)', from their very first radio broadcast on March 8, 1962 (featuring Pete Best on drums); The Coasters' arrangement of 'Besame Mucho' and Joe Brown's 'A Picture Of You', both from June 15, 1962 (still with Best on drums); Slim Whitman's 'Beautiful Dreamer' from January 26, 1963; Chuck Berry's 'I'm Talking About You' from March 16, 1963; and Carl Perkins' 'Lend Me your Comb' from the broadcat of July 16, 1963.

Of these, the first five are audibly much too poor to bring up to scratch for the album - listeners' recordings that were evidently not made via direct feed into a good quality grundig, but rather with a cheap microphone placed next to the radio speaker while Mum was told to be quiet. In other words, items of historic importance that are not quite fit for general public consumption. yet the reason for omitting 'Lend Me Your Comb', which originates from the BBC's Bush House archive, is altogether less obvious.

Officially George Martin's selection criteria for the material involved both technical quality and the standard of the performance, and on the latter count the number just missed the mark. Unofficially, the powers that be may also wish to keep something in the can, and thus have somthing in reserve to use as a 'bonus track' enticement for some future release along with all of the alternate takes.

DROPOUTS AND MAGIC WANDS

"The Roling Stones only did about 12 sessions, and so the fact that The Beatles did 52 is absolutely phenomenal", says Kevin Howlett. "They really worked at it, and of course, they were playing live in the studio, although by '64 they did get a bit more sophisticated. They certainly didn't have a multitrack machine at their disposal. The first multitrack to come into the BBC was an eight-track, and that was a very long time after The Beatles had stopped doing sessions here. So, the only way that they could overdub was to put down a backing track and then play the tape back through the mixing desk and perform over the top of it. You can occasionally hear examples of this on some of their '64 recordings.

30 years later one of the problems which peter mew had to deal with, especially when working on some of the rarer recordings, was that of sound dropouts. For, whilst he was able to repair most of them, a close listen to the album indicates that there were still a few instances wher this was just not possible.

"The art, if you like, of using computer editing systems these days is that they allow you to take very small slithers of sound from elsewhere and patch them in, much like you would with a painting," mew explains. "But if you can't find a matching piece of sound from somewhere else in the song, then you just can't do it, because you obviously don't want to apply any new paint!

On 'A Taste Of Honey', for instance, there's an analogue dropout that has bugged me from the word go, but I couldn't do anything about it, because that piece of sound wasn't repeated anywhere else in the song. I also couldn't boost it, because it's not a particular level that drops for a particular length of time; it might drop a little bit here and then go up and down, and it's too long to restore using the click removal devices, which work on several milliseconds of sound. This dropout lasts for perhaps half a second and so you can't use the computer.

So, at the end of the day, contrary to what some people think, the Sonic Solutions system is not a magic wand. It's a piece of technology, and if you've got absolute garbage going in, then you'll have something better than absolute garbage coming out, but it ain't going to be perfect".

Anyway, in the case of The Beatles, Live At The BBC album, who really cares? This is vintage stuff and it serves to remind one that, in the final analysis, musical content is of far more importance to the average listener than sheer sonic quality.

SPOTTING TALENT

Brian Willey produced the December 4, 1962 and January 29, 1963 editions of The Talent Spot on which the Beatles first performed before a live audience. The first of these, recorded on November 27, 1962 at the BBC's Paris Theatre in Central London, featured the soon-to-be fab Four at the bottom of a star spangled bill comprising The Ted Taylor Four, Mark Tracey, Elkie Brooks, and Frank Kelly. Still, it served as a showcase for new talent and broke the mould in as much as no audition was required. In effect, therefore, it was like a broadcast audition.

Willey now recalls that after the first show, Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, "asked me, 'Do you like them?' and I said 'Well, they're rough, but they entertain me.' Bearing in mind that it was a live broadcast, a one-take job, they didn't do too badly. Epstein then asked me if I would have them back on the show. I said 'Yes', and by the time that happened, a few weeks later, they had already climbed the charts, and in fact, made a hell of a difference to my audience. This usually consisted of about 30 or 40 people, and now, suddenly, hundreds were packing the Paris and queueing outside on the street".

Full-scale Beatlemania was looming just ahead and the band's phenomenal rise to superstardom was underway. Yet it is only with hindsight that those who were involved in this story can fully appreciate the significance of what they took part in all those years ago. "Looking back they were great days", says Brian Willey, "but at the time, I was just doing a job, and I'm sure that none of us ever thought we were making a mark on history.

Oh well, back to the vaults...

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