Via the Beeb:
The earliest known full recording of The Beatles playing a live concert in the UK, at the point they were becoming the biggest band in the nation, has been revealed by BBC Radio 4's Front Row, almost exactly 60 years after it was made.
The hour-long quarter-inch tape recording was made by 15-year-old John Bloomfield at Stowe boarding school in Buckinghamshire on 4 April 1963 when the band played a concert at the school's theatre.
They had been booked by fellow pupil David Moores, who had written to manager Brian Epstein.
Epstein, perhaps recognising the connection to an important Liverpool family - the Moores family owned the Littlewoods football pools and retail business - agreed to the booking for a fee of £100, and Moores raised the funds by selling tickets to schoolmates.
Bloomfield was a self-confessed tech geek keen to try out a new reel-to-reel tape recorder.
...[The tape] captures the appeal of The Beatles' tightly-honed live act, with a mixture of their club repertoire of R&B covers and the start of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership, with tracks off their debut album Please Please Me, which had been released barely two weeks earlier, on 22 March.
They kicked off with the album's opening track I Saw Her Standing There and then segued into Chuck Berry's Too Much Monkey Business.
You can listen to the Front Row broadcast here.
And here's a snippet of the Beatles' performance:
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