Notes from inner cover:
It's The Beatles was originally videotaped at The Empire Theatre, Liverpool, on December 7th 1963. It was shown the same evening on BBC TV, but was not considered to be a technical success. Lack of rehearsal time and communication breakdowns among the crew meant that the camerawork was poor and the presentation rough. With insufficient time to edit the tape before broadcast, it went out in prime time with such glaring flaws as Ringo singing into a dead microphone the whole way through Boys.
The book Love Me Do captured The Beatles' reaction to the tv show in their dressing room, with John saying, "Someone at the BBC must really hate The Beatles" and Paul worrying what people who had not been to their shows would think of them now. But in any case the lads turned in a terrific performance, and despite the problems much of their charm did indeed still come through.
The tape would have become a prized relic of early Beatlemania had it not suffered the fate that so many early British tv programmes did. With no film copies requested for overseas sale, the tape was considered expendable and used for training purposes to teach BBC engineers how to
physically splice videotape. Eventually all but the last four songs where whittled away, and even those had substantial sections missing.
Fifteen years later, the audio of the broadcast finally surfaced on a bootleg LP titled Youngblood.
But it had been recorded with a microphone some distance from the tv, and the sound was among the worst of any live Beatleg available. For the next thirty years no other source was available, until another off-air recording turned up in 2007. It offered an improvement in clarity, but
unfortunately the owner decided to share it via Youtube rather than uploading it to a file sharing site. But worse than the Youtube encoding were other flaws affecting the tape, include loud clicks,phasing artefacts and serious speed instabilities. It was an improvement on the old version, but still far from perfect.
Finally, in 2009, a high quality copy of this legendary broadcast was located by murrays15.
Recorded from the tv broadcast via direct injection, it features all but three of the songs performed that day (From Me To You, This Boy and the closing instrumental). The audio has been carefully restored to remove as much of the mains hum as practical and iron out any sudden level
fluctuations. The track Boys was particularly messy, as the original balance engineer struggled to locate Ringo's vocal feed, randomly turning up microphones in a vain attempt to find the correct one. The equalisation has also been adjusted to compensate for the rather tinny sound of the original.
For From Me To You and This Boy the Youtube versions (via the Purple Chick cd) have been used, despite the speed fluctuations, because they are substantially clearer than the earlier tape. The Youtube source also provided most of the between-song announcements and the opening
seconds to several tracks. Another 'official' tape also proved useful, containing high quality extracts from several songs as well as some missing beginnings and endings. The surviving video also provided some useful segments, although I chose to use the off-air recordings for most of the actual songs (with the exception of the closing instrumental which, as I said, is missing from the offair tape). All the sections have been edited back into an uninterrupted reconstruction of the show which is, for the most part, comparable in quality to the the original broadcast.
Also included are some other tv spots from the period, including the edition of Juke Box Jury recorded that same day at the Empire Theatre. Although a high quality copy of this show was returned to the BBC during their 'Treasure Hunt' a few years ago, they have thus far only condescended to share a single extract with us. This section (dealing with Billy Fury's Do You Love Me Too?) has been pasted back into the more common tape of the show, with speed correction as required.
A complete version of the lads' appearance on The Royal Variety Performance is also included, along with some of the surrounding continuity. This is taken from the film transfer of the original videotape (long since erased), via the centre channel of the Anthology dvd (sans reverb) and some other unbooted sources. Another exciting find by murrays15 has been an off-air recording of this same show. Since this originated from the original videotape broadcast, the sound quality is much higher than what can be found on the optical film soundtrack, with greatly improved
dynamics and frequency response. Sadly the first two songs are heavily compromised by tape damage, but at least we now have a high quality copy of John's legendary Royal performance of Twist And Shout.
Since there was some room left over, I've also thrown in John and George's solo appearances on Juke Box Jury, with speed correction as required. John's cynical comments caused a lot of offence at the time, particularly to Elvis fans who were horrified to hear their idol being compared to Bing Crosby. George for his part shared the panel with a couple of bizarre guests, including ageing music hall star Reg Varney (best remembered as Stan in the low-brow comedy series On The Buses) and Carole Anne Ford, whose sole claim to fame was having played schoolgirl companion Susan in Doctor Who.
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