The Beatles' recording sessions

• 1. Introduction

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  The Beatles' recording sessions span from a rented afternoon at Phillips' Sound Recording Services in Liverpool in the spring or summer of 1958 to a reunion in the mid-1990s, and nearly everything captured on tape in between is locked away at Abbey Road Studios. Most of those tapes have never been officially released. What survives forms one of the most studied bodies of unreleased music in history, inspected by fans through bootlegs, leaked outtakes, and the painstaking annotations of collectors who have catalogued every false start and edit piece. How did a group that paid just 17 shillings and sixpence for its first session end up with a vault so culturally significant that a record label once rushed out an album just to keep recordings from entering the public domain? And what does it mean that so much of this music, the alternate takes, the scrapped songs, the midnight sessions, still technically belongs to the shadows?

• 2. The First Disc

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  Percy Francis Phillips pressed the Quarrymen's first recordings onto a mono 10-inch 78 rpm lacquer disc, not a shellac disc as had long been reported. The distinction matters: a lacquer is an aluminum-based disc coated with a material that allows grooves to be etched into it, whereas shellac was the older commercial format. The Quarrymen paid 17 shillings and sixpence for the session, the equivalent of 87.5 pence. After the recording, the session tapes were erased and reused for the next customer. The disc itself passed from John Lennon to Paul McCartney to George Harrison, each keeping it for a week, before landing with a pianist named John Duff Lowe. Lowe held onto it for 23 years. In 1981 he sold it to McCartney for an undisclosed sum. McCartney then brought in audio engineers to improve the sound, which by that point was buried under hiss from age and the low quality of the original recording. Both songs from that first session, "That'll Be the Day" and the McCartney-Harrison original "In Spite of All the Danger", eventually appeared on Anthology 1 decades later.

• 3. Hamburg and the First Four

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  On the 15th of October 1960, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison walked into a small Hamburg studio called Akustik to back a singer named Lu Walters, the bassist from a group called Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Their own drummer Pete Best was not there. Walters' bandmate Ringo Starr played drums instead, making it the first time the future four Beatles recorded music together. Stuart Sutcliffe, still in the band at that point, was present but did not play. Nine mono acetate discs were pressed; none are known to have survived. The tapes were most likely erased. Less than a year later, in June 1961, the group recorded several songs at what is now the Friedrich-Ebert-Halle in Hamburg, backing English rock and roller Tony Sheridan under the name the Beat Brothers. Producer Bert Kaempfert oversaw the sessions. The resulting recordings appeared on an album called My Bonnie, though the documentation from those dates is incomplete because official records were later lost in a fire. Sheridan later made recordings with other musicians, creating ongoing debate about exactly which tracks feature the Beatles; they are generally believed to appear on seven surviving titles. Among the two songs they recorded without Sheridan was "Cry for a Shadow", co-written by Lennon and Harrison, which eventually surfaced on Anthology 1.

• 4. The Decca Rejection

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  On New Year's Day 1962, the Beatles drove to London and recorded an audition for Decca Records starting at around 11 in the morning. They likely performed only one take of each of the fifteen songs, with no overdubbing. Decca passed. Their manager Brian Epstein kept the reel-to-reel tapes and had them pressed onto mono acetate discs to play for other record labels. One of those discs reached Parlophone producer George Martin, who offered the group an audition that proved more fruitful. The Decca session itself preserved performances of covers and originals, several of which, including "Like Dreamers Do", "The Sheik of Araby", "Hello Little Girl", and "Searchin'", later appeared on Anthology 1. Pete Best drummed on those recordings; by the time the group returned to London for their EMI audition on the 6th of June 1962, his days in the band were already numbered. George Martin was not satisfied with Best's playing during that session, and Best was soon dismissed. The EMI session tapes were destroyed per standard protocol, though at least two mono recordings were eventually discovered. A complete tape of the session surfaced after the death of engineer Geoff Emerick on the 2nd of October 2018; Emerick had apparently taken it home rather than allowing it to be destroyed. As of 2020, Emerick's family were in legal proceedings with Universal Music over who legally owns the recording.

• 5. Getting "Love Me Do" Right

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  Ninety days after their EMI audition, the Beatles returned to Studio 2 with Ringo Starr on drums to record their debut single. The session on the 4th of September 1962 did not go entirely smoothly. George Martin had chosen a song called "How Do You Do It" by Mitch Murray for them, but the group disliked it and pushed for an original composition instead. They recorded at least two takes of the Murray song and at least fifteen of their own "Love Me Do". The best take of each was pressed onto an acetate disc for Martin and manager Brian Epstein to review. The tapes from the session were later destroyed. Seven days later, on the 11th of September, producers brought in session drummer Andy White because of ongoing concerns about Ringo's drumming. White sat behind the kit while Ringo was relegated to maracas and tambourine on "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You". The group also attempted "Please Please Me" that day, but none of those takes were used. The White version of "Love Me Do" eventually displaced the Ringo-drummed version as the standard release; the original was destroyed, and later compilations had to source it from an original mono 45 rpm single. After the successful recording of "Please Please Me" on the 26th of November, Martin reportedly told the group: "You've just made your first number one."

• 6. February 11, 1963

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  On the 11th of February 1963, the Beatles recorded almost the entirety of their debut album in a single day at Studio 2, starting at 10 in the morning and finishing at 10:45 at night. The session produced most of Please Please Me. Among the songs completed that day was "Twist and Shout", recorded in just two takes, with Lennon's voice already strained by the end of a long day. The song "Seventeen" was later retitled "I Saw Her Standing There". Overdubs for "Misery" and "Baby It's You" were added by George Martin on the 20th of February, and the album was edited and mixed on the 25th. Takes of "Hold Me Tight" were also recorded at that February session but were destroyed, as the song was left off the album and not re-recorded for another seven months. In 2013, Apple Records released The Beatles Bootleg Recordings 1963, which includes previously unreleased outtakes and demos from that year, among them multiple takes of "There's a Place", "Misery", "From Me to You", and "I Saw Her Standing There". Apple's explicit reason for the release was to prevent those recordings from entering the public domain.

• 7. What the Vault Holds

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  Abbey Road Studios, formerly known as EMI Recording Studios, holds the session tapes for the vast majority of the Beatles' recorded work. Most of those tapes have never been officially released, but the outtakes and demos that have circulated have long been treated by fans as collectables. The only outtakes and demos to receive an official release were those on The Beatles Anthology series and its associated singles and anniversary album editions. Bits of previously unreleased studio recordings also appeared in The Beatles: Rock Band video game, used as ambient noise and to give songs studio-sounding beginnings and endings. The tapes' legal status has grown complicated over time. The proceedings between Geoff Emerick's family and Universal Music over the complete EMI audition tape, still unresolved as of 2020, illustrates how contested the ownership of even individual reels can become. The Quarrymen's earliest recordings, made at Phillips' Sound Recording Services, followed a different path: the session tapes were erased immediately for reuse, and the sole disc passed between band members before spending more than two decades in the possession of Duff Lowe, who sold it to McCartney in 1981.