Purple Chick's Star Club Recordings

Thank you Purple Chick and thank you Serena for allowing me this listening pleasure. I am listening to "Hot Dog" when I'm writing this, and now we have a longer version of the song. Now this edition is better than all the crappy previous releases. The Hamburg tapes suddenly became my favourite gig - a promotion from bottom to top!

This time not only the sound quality is better but the release also preserves all the banter between the songs: we hear Horst Fascher singing and talking in German. Previous releases omitted all that stuff but I think it was a mistake. The band that performed in 1962 was not yet the Beatles that was introduced in the Ed Sullivan show - the band was not 'fab four', it was 'fab about four or five'. The band is Beatles but not the Beatles: there was place for other people to perform with the band. I hopefully now understand why Tony Sheridan was offered a place in the band but he turned the offer down (because he was a bigger star that time).

The mistake of the previous releases was to try to make a Beatles record out of the Hamburg material but that 'commercial' solution did not do justice to the original performance, there was John, Paul, George and Ringo but they were still in their formative phase. It is better to take the attitude that the band is not yet the Beatles, otherwise a huge entertainment value will be lost. Now with the Purple Chick edition the Hamburg tape has its original context and it is more close to the original show that was uniquely spectacular in its time.

PS. There could be a backup Beatles: Tony Sheridan, Klaus Voormann, Horst Fascher and Pete Best. Hah, just a wild idea.

Now playing "Red Sails in the Sunset"...