New old Beatles bootleg!!

I am, as you may have gathered, a massive music geek. A nerd, a trainspotter, an anorak, a noddie, a saddo. When I get to interview pop stars, I usually waste half my allotted time talking about arcane synthesizers and the "craft" of songwiritng (nb: pop stars hate this, unless they're Natasha Bedingfield).

You know those classic albums documentaries where bearded producers sit behind a mixing desk fading guitar lines in and out, while explaining how Mick Fleetwood snorted an entire suitcases of cocaine off the back of a Rickenbacker? Best television ever.

So, it hardly comes as a surprise to find that I pored obsessively over those Beatles Anthology CDs a deacde ago, in thrall to John Lennon's early, casette tape demos of Strawberry Fields, and smiling in sympathy at George Harrison's ropey first attempt to play the sitar.

So, the discovery earlier this week of an unreleased, 11-minute outtake from the band's White Album sessions made my ears prick up like a pixie. It's an alternative take of Revolution 1 (the slow, bluesy version of the Revolution single) which segues into some of the Karl Stockhausen-inspired sound collage experiments of Revolution 9.

Unlike the album version, however, this isn't a cacophonous mess.

Some fans reckon it's a fake, but others point out that it matches almost perfectly a description of the song in Mark Lewisohn's exhaustive document of the Beatles in the recording studio, Recording Sessions (although I prefer Ian MacDonald's masterful Revolution In the Head).

Anyway, enough of me. You'll want to hear the bootleg. It was on Youtube (youtube) until EMI posted a "cease and desist" notice, essentially confirming that its real. But you can listen to all 11 glorious minutes on music blog The Talent Show.

I'll post something about Girls Aloud later.

Tweet