One off Beatles single
A two-sided 10″ record, to be played at 78 rpm.
A record Brian Epstein (his handwriting on the label) had made at the HMV store in Oxford Street in 1962 to bring around and play when he had meetings with record companies is up or auction. It contains two songs from the Decca audition of the Beatles.
Epstein wrote “Paul McCartney & The Beatles”, because he sang lead on the track.
The record contains two songs, “Hello Little Girl” and “‘Till There Was You”. It’s the granddaughter of Les Maguire (74) from the Liverpool group Gerry and the Pacemakers who is auctioning off the record, estimated to bring in up to £10,000. It’s likely that this record was used for the Pacemakers to learn “Hello Little Girl”, which they went on to record.
“Hello Little Girl” was offered to Gerry and the Pacemakers as a follow-up to “How Do You Do It”. They recorded it 17 July 1963, but decided not to release it, opting instead for Mitch Murray’s song “I Like It” – probably a wise move.
Before the Pacemakers, on 3 July another Liverpool group, The Fourmost recorded a version of the song at EMI in Abbey Road, produced by George Martin. Released on 30 August, it became the group’s debut single and went to no. 9 on the UK charts. Gerry and the Pacemakers’ version of the song was canned and remained unreleased until 1991, when it appeared on their CD “The Definitive Collection”.
John Lennon & The Beatles is the “Hello Little Girl” credit.
The version on this Beatles single was released on “Anthology 1” in 1995.
Omega Auctions will auction off the single on 22 March.
Source: BBC News
Gerry's version of Hello Little Girl is about as enhusiastic and powerful as The Bearles version of How Do You Do It! Not heard it before…
This is a pretty historic disc, if it's what I think it is. Brian got the Decca tapes transferred onto a stack of 78s at the HMV store in February 1962 – and he took this very object in to EMI and played it to George Martin. (This was entirely independent of the group's later signing to the label.) It was the first time they would have met and the first time Martin would have heard the Beatles, although he wasn't apparently impressed.
One of the other discs made that day was "Like Dreamers Do", and Brian got Sid Colman (Ardmore & Beechwood) to listen. He liked that one, and that led to the group eventually signing with EMI.
I'm just so glad that something like this exists in this day and age.
And me, as a historian and archivist, I am NOT glad that historical sources like these are not public property, are not part of the collection of public archives, but private, personal property of some collectors, popping up for auctions every decade or so, with the revenue to pay for the collector's old-age home or burial. No, no, no!