Rare 15 track demo of The Beatles thought ‘lost’ discovered in Canadian record store

• A rare Beatles recording has been unearthed in a record store in Canada.
• The tape is thought to be a rare recording of a session they had to sign with Decca.
• History though would detail how Decca passed on the band, leading to their legacy with George Martin and Parlophone.

While Sir Paul McCartney continues to clean up previous songs by The Beatles through the use of artificial intelligence, will it be enough for a recent discovery found in Canada?

Billboard reported that a rare, 15 track demo of The Beatles was unearthed in a record store in Vancouver, with the record store’s owner thinking he had just found a bootleg of the band - a bootleg being an unofficial record of either a band’s demos or live recordings.

“I just figured it was a tape off a bootleg record,” Rob Frith, the owner of Neptoon Records posted on social media, “after hearing it last night for the first time, it sounds like a master tape. The quality is unreal.

How is this even possible to have what sounds like a Beatles 15-song Decca tapes master?”

The recordings are believed to be from a January 1962 audition session The Beatles recorded at Decca Studios in London; infamously, Decca passed on signing the band, leading the Fab Four to join up with George Martin and Parlophone instead.

They would later release their debut album, Please Please Me, in 1963, and the rest as they say is pop culture history.

Where did the tape come from?

Frith would search out for the person who brought the tape to Canada - a former Vancouver label executive, Jack Herschorn. According to the executive, the tape was gifted to him by a producer in London in the 1970s, who hinted he should "sell copies in North America.”

“It didn’t feel like the moral thing to do,” Herschorn explained to CBC. “These guys are famous and they deserve to have the right royalties on it. It deserves to come out properly.”

Those wanting to take a listen to a snippet of the session can visit Frith’s Instagram profile, where he has uploaded a sample of “Money (That’s What I Want),” though discussions about what to happen with the tape next remain up in the air.

Ideally, according to Frith, he’d be happy giving a copy to Decca or personally hand-delivering the tape to Sir Paul McCartney.

Do you have any old Beatles memorabilia in your home that might be worth something, or have you discovered an old recording that might be worth something? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment down below.