Decca Records Hits CTRL+Z

On January 1st, 1962, the Beatles drove 10 hours through snow to a Decca studio in West Hampstead, borrowed the company's amplifiers, and played 15 songs in an hour with Pete Best on drums. Five weeks later, on February 6th, Brian Epstein sat down to lunch at Decca's head office on the Thames and heard the answer. Dick Rowe, the man who chose what Decca recorded, had picked a group from Dagenham instead, 12 miles from the studio rather than 200. Signing would have cost Decca almost nothing. Rowe's own assistant, Mike Smith, wanted both groups and was told he could have one. Epstein had promised Decca's sales department that his family's shops would buy 3,000 copies of any single the group made, which in 1962 was enough to cover the record before it existed. Rowe said years later that the number would have forced him to sign them. Nobody on the sales floor carried it upstairs, and Epstein left with 2 reels of tape in his briefcase. What if somebody had said the number out loud? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the lunch where Decca said no, and follow the ripple to today: a hired drummer at the kit while Pete Best watches through the control room glass, Ringo Starr on a boat to Hamburg for £20 a week, a producer who quits the biggest band in the world over a van driver's wages, an orchestra on a riser in West Hampstead in 1967, and a tour bus outside a red brick building that isn't Abbey Road. The tapes end up in the same company's vault either way, because on the one afternoon it counted, a sales manager finished his coffee and repeated a figure.