Decca Audition - January 1, 1962

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Event
Date January 1, 1962
Short description The Beatles' unsuccessful Decca audition.
Location Decca Studios
A copy of the audition tape
A copy of the audition tape

This famous audition for Decca Records took place on New Years Day, 1962. The session came after Mike Smith, a representative of Decca A&R saw The Beatles playing The Cavern Club on December 13, 1961. He didn't think their performance was good enough to give The Beatles a record deal, but he did agree to give them an audition. The group left Liverpool to go their London studios with driver and roadie Neil Aspinall, arriving just in tme form the 11:00 AM session. Brian Epstein traveled by himself on a train. It annoyed The Beatles that Mike Smith showed up late, after celebrating the new year late the night before. Sixteen songs (although most sources say fifteen) were recorded. The song Youngblood is said to have been played at this session in the Live At The BBC! booklet, however, most sources omit it because no recording has been released, on bootleg or official release. It is likely, however, that if Youngblood were to be played, it would either have been not recorded or deleted. It has also been suggested that the song What'd I Say was performed at the Decca audition, but it, too, might not have been recorded. Like Dreamers Do, Love Of The Loved, and Hello Little Girl were all Lennon/McCartney originals. All three songs would later be given to other Epstein-managed acts. All the songs were recorded in one take without overdubs allowed. To stay on the safe side, Brian Epstein persuaded The Beatles played more traditional numbers, as well as some of their own. John later blamed him for their rejection from Decca, saying that things would have gone better if they had played more rock and roll numbers. In the end, although producer Mike Smith was impressed by The Beatles, Decca boss Dick Rowe was reportedly not, and instead gave a contract to Brian Poole and The Tremeloes, who also auditioned for Decca on that day. Rowe cited his reason for rejecting The Beatles as the fact that, in his opinion, they "sounded too much like The Shadows."

[edit] Recorded On This Date

The only published account of the Decca audition
The only published account of the Decca audition

A (*) indicates a performance not available on any release, legitimate or bootleg.

[edit] Sources



Just six months after their first true recording sessions in Germany lending essentially uncredited support to singer Tony Sheridan, The Beatles seemed perilously close to signing a recording contract under their own name back home in England. Even before officially becoming the band’s manager, Brian Epstein was apparently already delivering on his promise to get them a record deal when he arranged an audition with Decca Records in London for New Year’s Day, 1962. John, Paul, George and Pete left Liverpool by van the night before with Neil Aspinall driving. Owing to extreme winter weather, which caused Neil to get lost a little more than a third of the way around Wolverhampton, the roughly 340 km trip from Liverpool took ten hours. The next day, Epstein, The Beatles and Aspinall arrived at Decca studios for their 11 am appointment with Decca A&R assistant Mike Smith, who had seen the band perform on 13 December 1961 at the Cavern. The Beatles’ road-worn amplifiers did not impress Smith, and he insisted they use the studio’s equipment for the audition instead, compounding the group’s sense of unease after a grueling trip. An hour later they had filled two reels of tape with a total of fifteen songs, and Smith rushed the group out to make way for Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, his next audition of the day. Under these less-than-ideal conditions, The Beatles for the first time stood on their own in a recording studio. Though from our current vantage point there is a certain charm to hearing them falter through their first audition, there is very little obvious evidence of the band’s later brilliance to be found in these fifteen performances. Decca head of A&R singles Dick Rowe, long pilloried for rejecting The Beatles, can be forgiven for not hearing the architects of a revolution in the acetates Mike Smith cut for him. While Epstein specifically chose these songs from the band’s stage repertoire in an attempt to highlight their diversity, the selection was not representative of how The Beatles saw themselves, a fact which resulted in the band subsequently asserting full control of the music while Epstein was left to tend to business concerns. If these recordings, then, are not an entirely accurate picture of The Beatles as performers at the time, they nonetheless capture a moment in the band’s history when they were nervously hopeful, hedging their bets, yet very close to making the connection that would allow them to discover their full potential.

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