Australian "Lost" Beatles tapes turns out to be a hoax

The hunger for 'lost' Beatles music never ends

By MARK BROWN
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

The story is as predictable as clockwork.

Every few years, some "lost" Beatles tapes are found. In some improbable place, a previously unknown stash of tape is found that is the great missing Beatles album.

In July, the Associated Press and Reuters breathlessly reported that a British tourist, Fraser Claughton, had bought an old suitcase at an Australian flea market for $36 (U.S.) and found it filled with memorabilia and hours of unreleased Beatles songs.

Speculation is rampant that the suitcase contains the late Beatles associate Mal Evans' secret stash, missing for years.

Except, of course, it's not true. The stuff in the suitcase dated from 1995, 20 years after Evans' death. Despite reports of a reel-to-reel tape found in it, the Beatles expert called in to examine the music reported that it was on CDRs.

Yet the story ran in newspapers and magazines around the world, with virtually no follow-up now that the story has been debunked.

"I'm really surprised they don't do their fact-checking a little better. Any fan can tell you it isn't true," says Archer, the Sunday-morning host of "Breakfast With the Beatles" on Denver station KQMT-FM. He goes by the one name.

Archer is one of the world's pre-eminent Beatles experts, having studied the band for decades and interviewed the members extensively. He has one of the largest private collections of rare and unreleased Beatles music in existence, much of which he airs on his show. He has Beatles music that's never been heard by the public, not even on bootleg.

You can't say that for the supposed Australian find. The Times of London put a short snippet of a John Lennon demo, "I'm in Love," on its Web site so fans could hear the "lost" track. Had they done an Internet search, they would have found the song in its entirety, as it was released on the bootleg CD "Arrive Without Aging" a decade ago after being broadcast worldwide on "The Lost Lennon Tapes" radio series in the '90s.



Peter Nash of the British Beatles Fan Club was called in to examine the latest find and immediately branded it a "non-story" and "complete nonsense."

"The unreleased recordings turned out to be common bootleg material. The guys who owned the stuff said they had Abbey Road reel-to-reel tapes but could not produce said items when I asked to see them," Nash posted online and confirmed via e-mail with the Rocky Mountain News. "Furthermore, they stated that the tapes were in the original metal canisters. As you know, film reels are kept in metal canisters, but audio tape, which is magnetic, is always housed in cardboard or plastic boxes."

All the suitcase contained, he says, was "run-of-the-mill Beatles memorabilia -- nothing rare, just average flea-market stuff."

It's just part of the long history of hunger for new Beatles.

"The 'new Beatles discovery' story will crop up for the next hundred years, probably, but will almost always prove bogus, at least in terms of music," says West Coast Beatles expert Rip Rense, contributing editor to Beatlefan Magazine.

A few years ago, also in Australia, audio feeds from the cameras that filmed the "Let It Be" sessions in 1969 were found. There was a great uproar at the time, but again, nearly all of it was stuff that was already safely in EMI's vaults. No great lost songs were found. Also recently, headlines screamed about a tape of a secret 1976 Beatles reunion. The tape was blank.

Even the Beatles people themselves can't keep it straight. When the "Yellow Submarine" soundtrack was rereleased and upgraded, spokesman Geoff Baker told the press that an unreleased rocker had been found that would turn the world on its ear. Turns out it was the standard studio version of "Hey Bulldog," legitimately available for decades.

When Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr added their input to two Lennon demos for the Beatles' "Anthology" series, even they didn't realize that both those songs had already been released, "Real Love" on the "Imagine: John Lennon" soundtrack and "Free as a Bird" on the "Lost Lennon Tapes" series. They were about to do a third, "Grow Old With Me," "until somebody pointed out it was released on the 'Milk and Honey' album," Archer says.

There have been genuine missing items over the years. For instance, in doing "Anthology," researchers found and included an early George Harrison song, "You Know What To Do," that was undocumented anywhere.

Interestingly, the suitcase story has overshadowed what may be a real find. A 70-year-old British man, Vernon Warburton, found an old tape reel in his attic that supposedly contains rehearsal versions of "She Loves You," "You Really Got a Hold On Me," "Roll Over Beethoven" and more.

"The description of it doesn't line up with anything that has been bootlegged," Archer says. Analysis is under way.

Thanks for the article, MaccaGirl, but Paulrus posted the same onehere a few days ago. If you don't mind, I'm going to go ahead and close this topic, since the other one already has a few replies.