Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Some years ago a Canadian reader got in touch: Piers Hemmingsen from Toronto, a retired computer programmer and Beatles expert. From time to time he visits London, where his son lives, and we meet for coffee at a Beatles-themed café in Notting Hill, where photos of the Fab Four beam from the walls as Piers and I catch up on each other’s news.His latest venture has made the actual news, including coverage in Billboard, the US music trade magazine, and the Toronto Star newspaper. The interest is due to a bootleg recording that Piers owns of The Beatles playing a Canadian concert in 1965. It appears to be the only audio record of the gig in existence, and its sound quality is markedly better than most other Beatles bootlegs. Piers acquired the reel-to-reel tape while researching his labour of love, a monumental two-volume history called The Beatles in Canada. As the Fabs only played nine shows in Piers’s vast nation, this might seem to be a rather slim undertaking. But they actually took off in Canada before the US cottoned on. This is a source of aggrieved Canadian pride, as their overbearing neighbour to the south hogs all the attention. The Ed Sullivan Show, Shea Stadium, yada yada yada. The Beatles in Canada remedies the neglect. The first volume covers the origins of Canuck Beatlemania over the course of 468 handsomely illustrated, forensically detailed pages. It was published in 2016. The follow-up, chronicling the years between 1964 to 1970, awaits the printing press. In order to raise the money to produce and distribute it, Piers is selling his Beatles bootleg.“The Beatles are the most bootlegged band on the planet,” he tells me, speaking by video call from his Toronto home. “There are many hundreds of bad recordings of Beatles concerts. What this one represents is in the upper echelon in terms of quality.”The gig took place during the second of the band’s three North American tours. The first was in late summer 1964, when Beatlemania was at its height. Then came return visits in 1965 and 1966. After that they quit the live circuit, disenchanted by hectic touring schedules to sports arenas where feeble sound systems were drowned out by clamorous fans.Piers’s bootleg — or Beatleg, in collectors’ lingo — was made in August 1965 at an afternoon concert at Maple Leaf Gardens, an ice hockey arena in Toronto. The Beatles played a 12-song set lasting a brisk 30 minutes, which they repeated a few hours later at an evening gig. Two nights previously they had been performing in Shea Stadium in New York. The following night they would be in Atlanta, an international flight of over 700 miles.Disillusion had not yet set in: The Beatles were thrilled to be playing big venues. Shea Stadium was the first ever stadium show by a music act. “And it was fantastic, the most exciting we’ve done,” John Lennon later said. Their twin Toronto gigs took place before audiences of 18,000. The bucolically named Maple Leaf Gardens was dense with screaming girls, flashbulbs, people fainting, fans standing on seats. It was stiflingly hot. The arena’s owner had supposedly switched off the air conditioning in order to sell more drinks. Most live Beatles bootlegs are muffled affairs with the band tintinnabulating and rasping amid the audience uproar. Piers’s recording was made using the venue’s mixing desk, through which were fed the sound signals from the microphones and electric instruments on stage. Only a handful of people have heard it. With commiserations to my so-called rivals at Billboard and the Toronto Star, I am the first journalist to get a taster, in the form of clips from three of the dozen numbers in the setlist. “We’d like to carry on with a song from our album ‘Beatles ’65’,” Lennon says before their cover of Carl Perkins’ “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby”. He monkeys about making odd comical sounds while introducing “A Hard Day’s Night”. In “Can’t Buy Me Love,” Paul McCartney turns the excitement up a notch. “Will you join in and clap your hands?” he cries to a volley of screams. “Yes?” Louder screams. “Yes! Good!”The sound quality is raw but the music comes across strongly, especially Lennon and McCartney’s vocals. The vigour and accuracy of their singing are striking. Meanwhile, George Harrison firmly strums his guitar and Ringo Starr keeps matters moving at the drum kit. The screaming is a constant flood of noise in the distance, like a trebly Niagara Falls.It is unknown why the concert (including the four support acts) was recorded. The same happened at the following night’s Atlanta gig, which is widely available as a soundboard bootleg. But Piers’s recording appears, surprisingly, to be both unique and unheard. “You always think, well this can’t be the only copy as it’s The Beatles,” he says. He purchased the two reels of tape in 2011 from the son of the building superintendent who worked at the hockey arena. It was an accidental acquisition, thrown in as a job lot with another piece of memorabilia that he was buying (a video of the concert that The Beatles gave at Maple Leaf Gardens the year before). Piers tried to interest The Beatles’ company Apple Corps in the tapes, which led to a trip in 2015 to the moptop mecca of Abbey Road Studios in London to play it in front of Giles Martin, the record-producer son of the band’s producer George Martin. But no dice.“So back I came to Toronto having had the great experience of being in Abbey Road Studios and meeting Giles Martin and all the engineers. But I really just filed it back away and forgot about it,” Piers recalls.Poor quality was one of the reasons given for Apple’s indifference. However, it transpired that Piers had been playing the tape on the wrong type of machine. This was discovered by veteran Canadian recording engineer Doug McClement, who tried using a different device after Piers’s interest in his bootleg had been reawakened by the recent upsurge in Beatles archival activity. “When I heard it on the half-track player, it was like day and night,” Piers says.A feted figure in Canadian rock history, John Brower, is helping him to sell the tape. Brower was a leading concert promoter who staged the debut performance by Lennon and Yoko Ono’s group, The Plastic Ono Band, at a famous Toronto music festival in 1969. Last month, he played the tape to his friend Bob Ezrin, the record producer who worked on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, among other classic albums. “Bob sat there gobsmacked listening to this,” Brower says.Commercial rights for live Beatles recordings belong to McCartney and Starr and the estates of Harrison and Lennon. “I think this has to be looked at as something that will be most likely acquired by someone who has the financial ability to consider it in the same way as a work of art,” Brower says of Piers’s Beatleg. “It could be treasured and shared at home by a small group of friends over the years.”The price is $250,000. A lot of money — but not out of kilter with the market in Beatles memorabilia: a cardboard poster for their 1966 concert at Shea Stadium sold for $275,000 in 2022. “That price reflects what it will cost to do justice to these books,” Brower says, referring to Piers’s grand publishing project. If all goes to plan, justice will also be done to Canada’s overlooked part in The Beatles’ story. Adds Brower, with a concert promoter’s karmic flourish: “Now these tapes are going to finance The Beatles in Canada, a legacy and history that are so unknown on a worldwide level.”Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
