One of the reasons the 50th anniversary edition of The Beatles, aka The White Album, was named Long Live Vinyl’s Best Reissue last year was because it finally gave an official release to the Esher Demos. Recorded at George Harrison’s Surrey mansion in Esher, these early versions of The Beatles' songs allowed fans to hear how classics such as While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Back In The USSR developed, often glimpsing wildly differing versions to the established end results. The expanded The Beatles was a great example of how to release an official version of a widely circulated bootleg, helping fans discover ‘new’ Beatles music they never knew existed.
Many audiophiles will own a sneaky copy of their own favourite bootleg, the studio recordings of a favourite artist who has quietly airbrushed their unreleased masterwork off their CV; the dodgy disco album the record label wisely rejected; a disastrous three-month session with the hot producer who turned out to have an even bigger ego; the songs lost to copyright disputes when the band changed record labels… all these have contributed to the great unreleased album.
Many of these are bootlegged in a quality which makes the artist despair. An important factor in the respect for Esher Demos is how superior it sounded compared to the bootlegs which had circulated among Beatles fans for decades. Anyone with a passing knowledge of audio knows how distorted a recording becomes once it gets beyond a first-generation copy, and the Esher Demos’ release brought that reality home. As The Beatles’ remastering engineer Miles Showell told Long Live Vinyl: “The Esher Demos bootlegs that turned up among fans were terrible copies – they played at the wrong speed and sounded awful.” Harrison was The Beatles’ in-house cataloguist, with the original four-track Esher Demos recordings kept in pristine condition by his widow Olivia. “To get demos of that good quality from 1968 is frankly incredible,” says Showell.