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Vinyl L.P • Stereo • Polydor Records • SLPHM 237 632.
1964 • Germany.
Recorded in Hamburg 1961
Featuring Tony Sheridan & Guests
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Back cover.
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Labels.
Masters Of British Rock Vol. 1 · John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr · The Solo Years + Friends, Relatives & Special Guests
ReplyDeleteThe Beatles' First! was released in April 1964 by German Polydor (Polydor 20328) and was available in the UK as an import.
Four songs by Sheridan with other musicians were added to the eight recorded by the Beatles. The track "Take Out Some Insurance on Me, Baby" was mistitled "If You Love Me, Baby". The following month, Polydor France issued a 10 inch LP, simply entitled Les Beatles [fr], that compiled exclusively the Beatles' Hamburg recordings.
On 4 August 1967, Polydor officially released The Beatles' First in the UK (catalogue number 236-201), but with a sleeve designed by Barry Zaid which omits the exclamation mark.
In New Zealand, the album was released three times: firstly in 1966 (cat. no. 237632, as above), secondly in the early 1970s, titled The Beatles in Hamburg (cat. no. NZ SP 125) and in 1977 as a double LP (cat. no. 118).
In Canada, the album was released in 1969 with the title Very Together (Polydor 242.008), while the US issued the album the following year under the title In the Beginning (Circa 1960) (Polydor 24-4504) with "Take Out Some Insurance on Me, Baby" correctly named.
All subsequent releases of the Tony Sheridan/Beatles/Beat Brothers recordings are repackages of the same tracks.
The album was released on CD in 1984 under the title The Early Tapes of The Beatles which included two more bonus tracks by Sheridan and the complete recordings of the songs "Ya Ya" and "My Bonnie", the latter with its slow intro sung in English.
It was expanded to a double-CD set subtitled Deluxe Edition, with two tracks replacing the previous edition's bonus tracks, issued by Universal Music on 12 June 2004. The main tracks are in stereo on the first CD and in mono on the second CD. This release used similar artwork from the original German sleeve.
The eight tracks recorded by the Beatles were compiled, in all their published variations, in the double album "Beatles Bop – Hamburg Days" in 2001 by Bear Family Records and ten years later by Time Life with the title The Beatles With Tony Sheridan – F1rst Recordings: 50th Anniversary Edition.