Star-Club

This guide to Hamburg's Star-Club follows a single reel-to-reel tape from December 1962, when Ted Taylor, known as Kingsize, singer of a rival Liverpool band called the Dominoes, asked John Lennon if he minded being recorded and rigged a lone ceiling microphone above the stage. For most of that month the machine simply ran, catching close to three hours of raw, sweaty club noise, much of it the Beatles mid-residency. You'll hear how Taylor then stuffed the tape in a cupboard at his mother's house and forgot about it for three years, and how Brian Epstein's first reaction to it, in 1965, was far from encouraging. Picture that single cheap microphone hanging above whatever stage stood roughly where you are standing.