The unofficial live Beatles album Live! At The Star-Club In Hamburg, Germany; 1962 was released in the United States on 13 June 1977.
Apple Corps had attempted to block the album’s release, but their request for an injunction was blocked in London’s High Court.
The Star-Club recordings were made by the venue’s stage manager Adrian Barber, during The Beatles’ third and final residency in Hamburg. Barber used a 3¾” per second Grundig home tape machine to record the group, with a single microphone placed at the front of the stage.
Although commonly believed to have been recorded on New Year’s Eve 1962, the songs were actually taped on more than one night during the residency, which took place from 18 to 31 December 1962. The Beatles’ early booking agent, Allan Williams, claimed that around three hours of performances were recorded between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Barber gave the recordings to Ted ‘Kingsize’ Taylor of Liverpool group The Dominoes. Taylor attempted to sell them to Brian Epstein in the 1960s, but Epstein considered them of little commercial value and offered just £20. Taylor kept the tapes at his home until 1973, when he began to look into marketing them.
Allan Williams claimed that when Taylor returned from Hamburg he left the tapes with a recording engineer. The project remained unfinished and the engineer relocated, leaving the tapes behind. In 1972, Williams said, he, Taylor and the engineer returned to the abandoned building to recover the tapes “from beneath a pile of rubble on the floor.”
In August 1973 Williams met Harrison and Starr at Apple, and offered to sell the Star-Club tapes for £5,000. The former Beatles declined, and Williams and Taylor joined forces with Paul Murphy, the head of Buk Records, to find another buyer.
Murphy eventually bought the tapes himself, and set up a new company, Lingasong, for the project. The worldwide distribution rights were sold to Double H Licensing, which spent over $100,000 on audio processing and mixing to make the recordings more commercially viable.
Live! At The Star-Club was first released in Germany in April 1977, and in the United Kingdom on 25 May. It was issued in the US by Lingasong in association with Atlantic Records, with a slightly different tracklisting. Four songs – ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘Twist And Shout’, ‘Reminiscing’, and ‘Ask Me Why’ – were replaced by four others from the same tapes: ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry (Over You)’, ‘Where Have You Been’, ‘Till There Was You’, and ‘Sheila’.