The Beatles’ first radio interview – recorded at Hulme Hall, Port Sunlight, the evening of Saturday 27 October 1962 – wasn’t for the BBC or Luxembourg but Cleaver and Clatterbridge hospitals on the Wirral. It aired the following lunchtime in Sunday Spin.

The interviewer was Monty Lister, who was in the useful habit of taping conversations with visiting celebrities, and he had with him a couple of lads from Port Sunlight Boys’ Club, Malcolm Threadgill and Peter Smethurst, to put questions ‘from the teenage angle’.

While lacking the vitality that would distinguish future Beatles interviews, a good seven-minute Q&A resulted – amusing, interesting and informative. Paul does most of the talking.
Each Beatle introduces himself and identifies his musical function.
Paul volunteers ‘John is in fact the leader of the group.’
He also tells how the Hamburg trips began,
discusses the Tony Sheridan recordings,
describes how it felt to appear on television,
and explains that he and John have written a hundred songs ‘but don’t use half of them’.
John then chimes in when Paul says they’ve signed an agreement that gives them equal shares in the songwriting;
Ringo is keeping count of his weeks as a Beatle (though he was one out – it was ten, not nine), and keen to point out an error in the current Musical Express [NME];
John mentions a composition they’d already tried to record once and would be returning to at their next EMI session (Please Please Me), and he quotes the catalogue number of their first, ‘Parlophone R4949’.

Text from Tune In, volume 1 of my history trilogy The Beatles: All These Years.

Beatles interview © Mark Lewisohn
I bought the tape and copyright from Monty Lister in 1985 and included it on a flexi-disc inside my first book The Beatles Live! the following year. In 1995 I licensed a brief extract to Apple Corps/EMI for inclusion in The Beatles Anthology 1.

Photo taken during the interview by Don Valentine. Unfortunately, Monty Lister ducked out of the shot; his image is from a 1960 interview with the Liverpool rock singer Billy Fury. Report from Port Sunlight News, Nov–Dec 1962.

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