Please Please Us: Lost tape of Beatles school gig could be saved for the nation

Sixty years ago, a little-known Liverpudlian band took to the stage at Stowe school in Buckinghamshire

Samira Ahmed: A tape that takes us back to an era of optimism

It was a sweet slice of cultural history and, at the same time, evidence of an unlikely clash of English social classes. The discovery of a tape recording of an early Beatles concert made in 1963 at a Buckinghamshire private school last week has astonished music experts and fans alike.

And now the crackling, hissing 60-year-old tape, complete with audible banter from the Fab Four, is to be restored for wider listening, according to the BBC journalist who uncovered the story, Samira Ahmed. The former student who made the tape, John Bloomfield, hopes to have it enhanced with the same kind of technology that has recently improved other early Beatles demo tapes and first studio takes.