Vancouver’s Neptoon Records discovers rare Beatles audition recording

Last week, late at night, when Rob Frith was wrapping up a work session at a friend’s studio, he decided to throw on one last tape for a listen.

It was labelled “Beatles 60s demos” and had been sitting around Neptoon Records, one of Vancouver’s most well-known record shops, unplayed. Frith, who owns the shop, had never listened to it, but had brought the recording to his friend’s studio that night, knowing he had the right player for the tape. 

“I thought it was just a reel-to-reel tape that somebody had put bootleg things on,” Frith said.

But when the tape played, the quality of the sound was clear and bright.

“It seemed like the Beatles were in the room,” he said.

Frith took a short video of the tape as it played and posted that clip on social media. Beatles fans were in awe, and messages started pouring in, Frith said.

Based on his conversations and some research, Frith believes the tape is a rare, direct copy of a famous audition recording from the band’s early days.

Decca audition

In the early 1960s, before the Beatles signed with Parlophone records and released Please Please Me, the band went searching for a label to sign with.

Part of that search included recording an audition tape with Decca Studios in London, on Jan. 1, 1962.

Decca ultimately passed on signing the fledgling group, but the audition tape survived, and was eventually made available as a bootleg album starting in the late 70s.

Finding one of those would be fairly unremarkable, but when Frith and his friend Larry Hennessey played the tape that night they knew they had something special.

Hennessey, who is experienced in music preservation, said he got a hint that the recording may be rare as soon as they took it out of the box and he saw white tape, known as leader tape, physically separating each song. 

“The way that’s wound on the tape, you can see that it separates the tracks … it’s not a fast copy or a bootleg,” he said.

Frith, who acquires new tapes from collections on a regular basis, said he isn’t certain who he got the tape from.

Left behind

After Frith’s post online with the clip made the rounds on social media, someone from the local recording scene reached out and connected Frith with a man who knew all about the tape’s origin: Jack Herschorn.

Herschorn, a former owner of Mushroom Records in Vancouver, brought the tape across the Atlantic in the early 70s.

During a work trip to London, a producer Herschorn knew handed him the tape and suggested he could put out copies of it in North America.

“I took it back and I thought about it quite a bit … I didn’t want to put it out because I felt — I didn’t think it was a totally moral thing to do,” he said.

“These guys, they’re famous and they deserve to have the right royalties on it … it deserves to come out properly,” Herschorn said, adding that he didn’t personally know the Beatles at that time.

He remembers listening to the tape, enjoying it, and wishing the world-famous musicians had been signed with his label instead. 

Herschorn held onto the tape, but only for a while. When he eventually left the business, he forgot the tape. 

“I should have took it, but it didn’t work out that way. You know, I had other things going on. I wasn’t thinking about it.”

Treasure preserved

Thinking ahead to the future of the tape, Herschorn said his hope is that Frith approaches Paul McCartney and suggests they release the tape.

He’s also not about to release the recordings to the public on his own, but if Decca wanted a clean version of it, he’d give the label a copy, he said. Or if McCartney were to come to Neptoon Records in person, Frith said he would give it to him.

Since there were bootlegs of the recording already out there, big Beatles fans have already heard the tracks, though not with this clarity, Frith said.

“People say it could be really valuable. I don’t know. I’m glad it’s preserved,” he said.

Another option, Frith said, would be to host an event in Vancouver where people could come and listen to it, and then donate the proceeds to charity.