A lost Beatles demo tape turned up in Vancouver. It sounds like a revolution | Canada Voices

There’s a very specific ache that comes from witnessing history not as it happens, but in the moment just before it does – when everything is still unformed, uncertain, and no one knows anything yet. It’s the kind of ache that feels both spectral and intimate, like looking at your own childhood handwriting or hearing a voice mail from someone who no longer exists in the form they once held. Last Friday, I sat in a small basement room of Neptoon Records in Vancouver, listening to The Beatles try, imperfectly, to become The Beatles. And I felt that ache so intensely I forgot, for a moment, what year it was.

The tape I heard was an unlabelled reel-to-reel believed to contain the original – or at least a master-generation copy – of The Beatles’ famous 1962 Decca audition. Long thought lost to time, bootlegged a thousand times over in degraded versions, this was something else entirely. The fidelity was uncanny. “It sounds like they’re in the room,” Neptoon owner Rob Frith, who found the tape, told me, with a kind of unguarded awe that made him, for a moment, seem like the same kid who used to stack his mom’s 45s and stare into the glow of her Bakelite record player. “I mean, it’s wild, right? They’re … just right there.”

Frith is not new to unearthing ghosts. He opened Neptoon Records in 1981, and in the decades since has become something of a folklorist for Vancouver’s underground music scene – compiling obscure compilations, collecting unreleased tapes, rescuing autographed Jimi Hendrix flyers from the oblivion of estate sales. He’s seen a lot. But this was different. “I would’ve sold it for 25 bucks,” he said, laughing, “if someone had asked me for a blank tape. It was just sitting on a shelf behind the desk.”

He didn’t, thankfully. And what we heard that afternoon was, in every sense, a document of a world that didn’t yet exist: The Beatles before they were The Beatles, on the brink of being denied by Decca Records, playing covers and three nascent originals with just enough conviction to suggest the future but not nearly enough to secure it.

The Decca session was recorded on Jan. 1, 1962. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best (Ringo would come later) took a 10-hour train ride from Liverpool to London through a snowstorm, lugging their gear and a dream to West Hampstead Studios. Brian Epstein had booked the session through sheer force of will and charisma, having convinced Decca’s A&R man Mike Smith to give the scruffy Merseyside group a shot. The band was nervous. Smith was reportedly hungover. The energy was off. They recorded 15 tracks, including three originals, in under an hour.

What they left behind was a curious artifact: not quite good enough to launch them, not quite bad enough to dismiss. And so Decca did what record executives do best when faced with genius in its larval state – they passed. “Guitar groups are on the way out,” one of them allegedly said. The Beatles were told they had no future in show business.

It’s a line that’s become so enshrined in the mythology of their rise that it feels apocryphal by now. But it did happen. And the tape – Frith’s tape, maybe – contains that moment, preserved with such clarity that it’s impossible not to feel protective of the boys in the room. They’re trying. You can hear the strain, the softness, the reach. McCartney’s voice on Like Dreamers Do is sweet and unsure. Lennon sounds a little bored through Searchin’. Harrison is bright and sharp, but there’s no magic yet. Not exactly. What’s most powerful is the absence of foresight – the raw unknowing that permeates every note.

And it’s this absence that makes the tape feel somehow sacred. Because in a time when history is so often a flattened, commodified experience – repackaged in documentaries with perfectly timed drone shots and talking heads – it is rare to encounter the past on its own terms. Not curated, not cleaned up. Just there.

The circumstances of the tape’s rediscovery are as chaotically charming as the session itself. Frith can’t remember exactly who sold it to him—only that it came from one of two retired sound engineers in Vancouver, whose collections included acetates, test pressings, and “weird stuff.” When he finally digitized it this year, while compiling tracks for a new instalment of his “History of Vancouver Rock” compilation, he did so mostly out of curiosity. His friend Doug Schober, a meticulous music nerd who now functions as the tape’s unofficial archivist, convinced him to “just play a bit, see what’s on it.” Within seconds, they knew they had something rare.

“I asked my engineer Larry Hennessey, ‘This isn’t from a record, right?’” said Frith. “He said, ‘Nope, this is a tape.’ And the more we listened, the more we started to see things that didn’t match any of the bootlegs.”

There are audible edits – September in the Rain has six distinct splices. One song ran four seconds longer than known versions. A bass fill popped up in the wrong place. The leader tape is intact, the sound is full and clean. Schober began researching obsessively, cross-referencing versions online, reaching out to Beatles experts, reading oral histories. What they found was staggering: the original Decca master is widely believed to be missing. And some suspect that the five songs released on Anthology 1 were not taken from studio tapes at all, but from bootlegs.

This is where the story folds in on itself, becoming speculative, then surreal.

One theory is that the tape was taken directly from Decca by an American producer working in the U.K. in the late ‘60s, who intended to bootleg it. That plan was scrapped. But the tape survived. There’s also the bizarre, tantalizing possibility that it passed through the hands of Tony Cox, Yoko Ono’s ex-husband, who once had access to Lennon’s archives and is rumoured to have left North America abruptly during a custody battle, taking valuable recordings with him.

The reel itself came in a repurposed box. On the outside, in ballpoint, someone had scribbled Tony Cox. A weird bread crumb on a trail that winds back to London and loops through the dusty back corners of Vancouver music lore.

“We’re just wondering,” Frith said, almost sheepishly, “whether this might have been John’s copy, or Tony’s, and it ended up here somehow.”

But of course, none of this can be proven. Not yet. Universal Music Group owns Decca now, and reaching Paul McCartney’s team has proven elusive. “They told me to just send it to the record label,” Frith said. “Like I’d just pop it in the mail.” He laughs. But the truth is, he doesn’t want to sell it. He wants to give it to Paul. Personally. “If he came and got it himself, I’d hand it over for free.”

That part, at least, I believe completely. Because Frith doesn’t care about monetizing this thing. He has Paul’s autograph already. He has Hendrix’s. He has stories about limousines rolling up in Burnaby and maybe, just maybe, John and Yoko waving from the window. And he has this room, this store, this whole analog empire built on belief. “We might do a charity event,” he told me. “Play the tape one last time live. That’s it. Then it’s over.”

Listening to that tape on March 28, I found myself thinking not just about The Beatles, but about the world they were stepping into, and the one we now live in. In 1962, the Cold War was humming. The Cuban Missile Crisis was months away. Youth culture was still embryonic, still in the throes of its own rehearsal. No one had any idea what was coming. And The Beatles – still called a “guitar group” by executives who thought the twist was the future – were just kids in suits, trying to get someone to believe in them.

Today, we live in a culture so overexposed to its own image that it’s hard to find a detail that hasn’t been processed, tagged, uploaded, and fed back to us as nostalgia. We’re drowning in Ai-generated songs and deepfake performances, in remastered everything and endlessly looped tribute acts. And in this context, a physical relic – a real tape, unpolished and human – feels like a revolution.

Because here’s the thing: AI might be able to recreate John Lennon’s voice, but it can’t recreate his self-doubt. It can’t capture the way McCartney stumbles into a harmony, or the precise chemistry of four guys trying not to blow their one shot. It can’t replicate the silence at the end of a song, when no one knows whether they’ve done well or not. It can’t recreate the ache of history not yet happening.

That’s what the Decca tape is. That’s what Frith has. Not just a recording. A reminder that even the greatest artists in the world started in rooms like this – small, uncertain, unheard.

I left Neptoon Records with the sound of the Beatles still ringing in my ears—not the Beatles we know, but the Beatles becoming. The Beatles in rehearsal. The Beatles before myth. And I felt, deeply, that this tape was a kind of protest against forgetting. Against smoothing the past into something clean and easy. It is, in all its imperfection, the sound of hope pressed to magnetic tape.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Frith if he thought there were more things like this out there, more tapes, more ghosts. “Oh yeah,” he said, eyes wide. “There’s always something. You just have to know where to look.”