The Beatles live: Cavern Club, Liverpool (lunchtime) – their first television appearance

The Beatles’ 126th lunchtime performance at the Cavern Club on Mathew Street, Liverpool took place on this day. It was also the first time that television cameras filmed them performing.

The group’s lunchtime shows typically lasted from 12-2pm. This was their 218th appearance overall at the underground venue on Mathew Street, including evening shows. In the evening they gave their 93rd late performance at the Cavern.

After receiving a number of letters from fans about The Beatles, a crew from Granada Television decided to investigate the growing phenomenon. Producers from Manchester-based Granada first saw the group perform at Cambridge Hall in Southport on 26 July 1962, and the company’s Dick Fontaine visited the Cavern on 1 August to check the lighting conditions before the film crew attended on this date.

The Granada crew filmed The Beatles performing ‘Some Other Guy’ for the Know The North programme.

The filming took place less than a week after Pete Best had been sacked from the group, and one male fan was captured shouting “We want Pete!” at the end of Some Other Guy.

They made their first appearance on television at the Cavern doing ‘Some Other Guy’. Ringo had only just joined them and you can hear the crowd shouting, ‘We want Pete’ at the end if you listen carefully. As a contrast, they also shot the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band and the films were never shown for two reasons. The Beatles film was too grainy but more importantly, the brass band wanted union rates for their members. There were 50 of them so the whole thing was dropped! Brian Epstein rang me and asked me to get some pressure to bear on showing the film. The grainy quality of that film doesn’t matter now. If you had a piece of film of the sinking of the Titanic, it wouldn’t matter that you couldn’t hear the band. It is history.

The audio and video are slightly out of sync, and although Lennon and McCartney are both singing in the video, only Lennon is fully audible. Beatles bootleg collectors continue to debate whether the two audio versions of ‘Some Other Guy’ are both from this date, and whether clip contains some audio dubbed from a later date.

Granada’s sound technician Gordon Butler returned to the Cavern on 5 September 1962 to make a second audio recording of The Beatles, using three microphones rather than the single one used on this date. He recorded them performing ‘Some Other Guy’ and ‘Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!’, the latter appearing in the Anthology series.

A tape featuring Butler’s audio recording of ‘Some Other Guy’ was discovered in 2015, having been forgotten about for years in a desk drawer.

The sound engineer ran me off an acetate of ‘Some Other Guy’ and ‘Kansas City’, and he gave another to Ray McFall and a couple to Brian Epstein. I kept mine in my box of records and I should have been more careful. When The Beatles became famous, the record disappeared. In 1993, a copy turned up at Christie’s and was sold for £15,000. I don’t know if it was my copy and anyway, I couldn’t prove it if it was.

The quality of the footage was judged to be too low for broadcast, and it was shelved until The Beatles became famous. ‘Some Other Guy’ was first shown on 6 November 1963 on Granada’s Scene At 6.30, and has been repeated many times since.