TV legend Bob Harris bringing 'The Songs The Beatles Gave Away' to Sunderland

Former Whistle Test presenter Bob Harris brings The Songs The Beatles Gave Away to 17Ninteeen on a date to be confirmed.

The show is about the incredible catalogue of songs written by the band, but never recorded by them except as demos. However, many were hits for other artists.

Some are quite well known. Bad to Me and World Without Love were Lennon & McCartney songs which made number one for Billy J Kramer and Peter & Gordon respectively.

But other acts to chart, with songs most people don’t realise the Beatles wrote, include the Fourmost, Cilla Black, PJ Proby and Mary Hopkin.

There are 29 such songs; enough to make the Beatles respected songwriters even if they had done nothing else. Even Bob Harris hadn’t heard some and recordings of most of them feature in show.

Bob is presenting the show as part of a UK tour alongside Fab Four expert Colin Hall; until recently the custodian at Mendips, John Lennon’s childhood home in Liverpool. Colin is the author of an accompanying book, also called The Songs The Beatles Gave Away.

“Whispering” Bob Harris rose to fame in the 1970s, with interviewees including John Lennon, David Bowie, Keith Richards, Keith Moon and countless others.

Bob said: “I truly believe there’s nobody in the world who has the knowledge that Colin has got.

“We were talking, 15 years ago, about the day that John met Paul, which was 6th July 1957. I decided I would pitch to Radio 2 the idea of making a documentary about that moment, because at the time nobody realised the significance of this meeting.

“So we made a beautiful programme, it’s award-winning actually. Afterwards Colin and I sat down and said we’d like to do something else. What else could we do? Colin said he had this idea for The Songs the Beatles Gave Away.

“He told me that in 1960, John Lennon was sitting in the back of a car, on tour with The Silver Beetles (as they were then known). Johnny Gentle was on the bill and he had this song he’d been working on. He had his guitar and they were jamming and talking.

“Johnny hadn’t finished the song. John said ‘How about this for an idea?’ and he sang a middle eight. Johnny Gentle put it straight in the song. It wasn’t released for a couple of years, but Johnny said to us that, even at that really early moment, you could tell the talent that John had.

“That was the first of the songs that The Beatles gave away, that band never released. It was called I’ve Just Fallen For Someone.”

Bob is looking forward to returning to Sunderland. One of his previous visits was alongside Marc Bolan on a T Rex tour.

Bob said: “The promoter in Sunderland reached out to us and this is what we’re finding now. We’ve got 60 dates in the book already. The pick-up has been really quite amazing.”

He added: “I was genuinely disappointed that Sunderland missed out in the play-offs. But they’re heading in the right direction.”