Everyone has had the dream. You imagine a moment where you’re clearing out your attic, or helping your nan clear out hers, and then, in a dusty old box, you find something. Something sparkly, something rare, something expensive.
…but how about something like one of the first-ever recordings of The Beatles?
I’m not talking about an early record. This isn’t a story about some old 7” like ‘My Bonnie’, which they recorded and released in Hamburg and so became a rare commodity elsewhere. This isn’t even a story of a special signed vinyl or a test pressing like Ringo Starr’s copy of The White Album marked with the product number 0000001 and selling for $790,000. No, this story is about a find even more rare.
It’s rare, but it also feels typical. Head to Liverpool and you’re bound to find countless people who claim they’re John Lennon’s aunt’s friend’s sister, or Paul McCartney’s dentist’s son. In this case, the story comes from a welder, who just happened to be the grandson of the man who lent the band a reel-to-reel tape recorder all the way back in 1959.
It was before the band were even recognisably The Beatles, back when the boy were exactly that – just boys in a band. But when Peter Hodgson stumbled across the old tape, the sound was unmistakable as even back in their first days, the sound of Lennon and McCartney could never truly be imitated.
“I could hardly believe it. I thought it was someone copying them, but I listened again and decided I would call McCartney,” Hodgson said after finding the tape up in his attic. On it was a recording of ‘Hello Little Girl’, an early track by the songwriting duo that they’d later give to Fourmost to make a hit.
Somehow managing to get a direct line to McCartney through what we can only assume is another typically Liverpudlian chain of connections, the man himself verified the tape and said that Sotheby’s would be interested in auctioning it off.
Hodgson lived the dream so many of us have had as he found this treasure, and it only kept getting sparklier. While The Beatles’ track was the main draw to the tape, its value was increased even more given that it was one of 16 songs on there, including a number by Ray Charles, too.
In the end, the welder got a good payout for it. As the auction house deemed it a “holy grail item”, the tape sold for £77,500, so Hodgson got a good payday and a piece of vital early Beatles history was dusted off and brought back into the light.