6 March 1963
Radio recording:
Here We Go
Playhouse Theatre, Manchester
(rehearsal: 4.00 pm; recording: 8.00 - 8.45 pm; broadcast: BBC Light Programme, 5.00 - 5.29 pm, 12 March)
I Saw Her Standing There (not broadcast)
Misery
Do You Want To Know A Secret
Please Please Me
"This episode of Here We Go was recorded at the Playhouse Theatre, Manchester on Wednesday, 6 March 1963, in front of an audience. It was broadcast by the BBC Light Programme FM, nationally, on Tuesday, March 12, 1963, 5.00pm to 5.29pm.
The tape featuring the three Beatles numbers contains a total of 13'46" of the show.
The tracks surviving are:
1) The Trad Lads, Instrumental
2) The Beatles, Misery (Lennon-McCartney)
3) The Beatles, Do You Want To Know A Secret (Lennon-McCartney)
4) The Beatles, Please Please Me (Lennon-McCartney)
5) Ben Richmond, Warmed Over Kisses (Left-Over Love)
written by P. Udell and G. Geld. Publishing credit on the original USA single by Brian Hyland is Pogo Music Corp, ASCAP. On the Dave Edmunds UK single from 1982 publishing credit is given to the Welk Music Group Ltd/Heath Levy Music Co Ltd.
6) The Northern Dance Orchestra, Waltz in Jazz Time
Composer is unknown, but this was originally recorded by Si Zentner on Liberty Records and probably is a Zentner composition.
7) The Trad Lads, unknown song
(It is also likely that the Northern Dance Orchestra played a number before the Trad Lads, at the opening of the show.)
Here We Go was normally broadcast on Fridays, but for some reason this show was broadcast on a Tuesday. This was the Beatles' fifth and final appearance on the show, but host Ray Peters incorrectly refers to it as their fourth. Brian Epstein later cancelled three appearances scheduled for June and July. The series was originally titled "Teenagers Turn: Here We Go" and was the show on which the Beatles made their radio debut in March 1962.
The Beatles also recorded "I Saw Her Standing There" for this particular show, but it was edited from the final broadcast. This was the first time that the public got to hear "Do You Want To Know A Secret" and "Misery" as the Beatles debut LP wouldn't be released until 22 March - on the same day that Kenny Lynch released Misery. His was the first cover version, while Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas version of "Do You Want To Know A Secret" would be released in April.
This show was recorded three days before the beginning of their U.K. tour, opening for Tommy Roe and Chris Montez. The single version of "Please Please Me" had just topped the New Musical Express chart, hence the reference in Ray Peters introduction, although this wasn't the chart which the BBC normally used.
Here We Go's house band was the Northern Dance Orchestra, aka the N.D.O., one of several bands employed by the BBC to fulfil a long-held agreement with the Musicians Union. Bands like the NDO, the Midlands Dance Orchestra, etc., were Musicians Union members and had to be employed to fulfil the BBC commitment to "live" music; it was because of this agreement that bands like the Beatles were booked to play live. A certain amount of "live" music time had to be alloted to counter the growing amount of time given over to the playing of records, now called "needle time" in radio parlance. Hence, some shows like Here We Go, Pop Go The Beatles and others were entirely live with no records played, while Saturday Club and Top Gear were a mixture of records and pre-recorded live sessions. Radio Luxembourg and the pirate stations (which appeared in 1964) had no such agreement with the Musicians Union and just played records.
The Trad Lads may have been another Musicians Union member band, specially formed for the purposes of radio work on the BBC. However, a group called the Trad Grads recorded for Decca in 1963. Ben Richmond recorded two songs for Pye's Piccadilly label in 1963. Warmed Over Kisses was not one of them.
About the survival of this particular tape
This show survives only because one of the evening's performers taped it directly off of FM radio onto a domestic tape recorder (which explains the superb sound quality). The 13'46" worth of Here We Go featuring the Beatles' three songs was buried in the middle of nearly three hours' worth of recordings of children playing, a few other minor off-air recordings and the like. The original tape - believed to be in the possession of the original recordist - is complete as reproduced here, but it is shedding oxide and is poorly spooled. Additionally, it was recorded as four mono tracks to get the maximum recording time, so it is impossible to play back on most conventional domestic open-reel decks.
The tape was salvaged by a recording expert in the UK, who transferred it onto analogue cassette while performing some minor tweaking. All that was done after this transfer was to feed the recording through No-Noise and Sonic Solutions to eliminate the prominent hiss, while a touch of boost was added to the drums. Unlike most Beatles BBC sessions, this recording comes directly off an original open-reel copy, via single generation of professionally recorded cassette without Dolby noise reduction. As such, you are hearing a fourth-generation-from-source recording (two analogic and two digital generations), which is closer to source than most commercial recordings. Any minor drop-outs are due to the age of the original open-reel tape; however, whenever possible these were edited.
This recording came to light just after the release of Great Dane's 9CD box set, in the Spring of 1994, and was donated to Great Dane to help complete the saga of the Beatles at the BBC."
Source: Here We Go (Great Dane bootleg CD) liner notes
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