Here's another footnote for the Beatles anthology.
A 1964 interview with the Fab Four that was only broadcast once has been discovered in a South London garage, where it had been tucked away in one of 64 film canisters for who knows who long.
Beatles historians have determined that the recording came from a sit-down that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr had with a Scottish television station on April 30, 1964, not long after their historic first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The interview was never even heard in the rest of the U.K., let alone anywhere else.
BBC Radio, which played excerpts from the nine-and-a-half-minute interview on Monday, aired the full conversation Tuesday afternoon.
During the segment, the mop-topped Lennon and McCartney discuss their first meeting in Liverpool and answer questions about their songwriting process.
"Normally we sit down and try and bash one out—but then again, there's no formula, because he [Lennon] could come up with one one day, completely finished," said McCartney, who was 21 at the time. "We still say we both wrote it though."
So how did this charming recording end up moldering away in a damp garage for 40 years?
Richard Jeffs, the Radio 4 producer and film enthusiast who came across the film canisters, told BBC Radio that his best guess is that they were discarded along with the telerecording machine that made them once the equipment was replaced by a video machine.
"I've got 63 other cans to open to see what we've got," Jeffs said. "It is very much like being a man with a million-pound note."