Welcome to yet another installment in the Beatles Rarity Of The Week series.

When The Beatles Anthology 1 CD set was released in November 1995, I was truly in awe over it. While I had heard some of the recordings on my own unofficial releases, there were many that were new to me. And in most cases, the quality of the recordings I already had in my possession were significantly upgraded.

One fascinating example of a historically significant set of songs is explained in the set’s accompanying booklet. In the spring or summer of 1958, The Quarry Men (John, Paul, George, John Lowe & Colin Hanton) heard about a guy named Percy Phillips. Percy owned a disc cutting machine, and for a small fee could make them a 78rpm vinyl 10-inch record with one track on each side. So, of course, John’s band had to make the trek across town with their instruments and make their first record. The A-side was idol Buddy Holly’s That’ll Be The Day and the B-side was an original song written mostly by Paul, but had a guitar solo by George that earned him a composition credit too. It was called In Spite Of All The Danger. Both of these songs have lead vocals by John Lennon and both are on The Beatles Anthology 1 CD set.

However there are two more pieces to the story that were not included in the CD booklet:

1) Since there was only one copy of the disc made, it was passed around amongst the band and ended up being saved in John Lowe’s private collection, and in July 1981 he made an attempt to auction it off. Paul McCartney had him served with an injunction until he could make an offer on it himself, and ended up purchasing from Lowe what was really already partially his, for a generous price. Afterwards, Paul made copies so that the original would not be degraded any further from playing.

2) While recording In Spite Of All The Danger, Percy Phillips was signaling frantically for them to wrap it up because they were running out of time on the disc (at 3 and half minutes!). Similarly, when the track was prepared for the Anthology disc, a repeated verse and chorus (around 45 seconds) were edited out of the recording. What you are hearing here is actually a forgery, created from the Anthology 1 account by inserting a second copy of the included verse and chorus that was repeated into the appropriate section that had been removed by EMI. Note that the repeated verse begins with the line I’ll look after you like I’ve never done before.

It’s actually a pretty charming recording with Paul harmonizing and John missing his vocal entrance cues in spots. At George’s guitar solo, an unidentified Quarry Man shouts out “honky tonk!”. Paul claims to have been inspired by Elvis’s Trying To Get To You when he wrote it. And now for your listening pleasure, you have a BROW-version, restoring the song to it’s original length.

Quarry Men photo at The Casbah Club (Liverpool) opening, August 1959

Want to make a suggestion for a future Beatles Rarity of the Week? Then let me hear from you. Read about more Beatles rarities and suggest one for me to post. You can begin by searching for different versions of specific tracks right here.

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