What if Decca had signed the Beatles?

I just heard the complete tapes the Beatles made on New Years Day, 1962 for Decca. I have to strongly suspect that Brian Epstein chose the songs because it’s a straight pop set with barely a hint of rock and strongly featured Paul’s undeniable abilities as a crooner. So what if Decca had liked the audition? Well, first, we’d have had Paul McCartney and the Silver Beatles. So there’d be no real Beatles. Second, the time of the crooner was not 1962! They would have had a small success in Britain and that would have been that.

It’s not that they didn’t do pop very well indeed. And it’s certainly not that Paul didn’t have the looks and the voice. Four or five years earlier he could have been another Vic Damone or Eddy Fisher! One could have an excellent nightmare out of the knowledge that we only just missed having another out of date crooner with a pretty good backup band instead of millions of screaming girls and some of the most innovative music on the planet. (and some bad stuff as well but that’s ok) In that case, John Lennon wouldn’t have been John Lennon but just some dude that played rhythm guitar.

I really can’t see any A & R man giving a group as much freedom as George Martin did the Beatles. Anyone else would have told them to shut up and do How Do You Do It. Nobody else would have listened and tried to find out what was in their minds, nobody else would have hired half a symphony to do 24 bars!! They would simply have been fed into the machinery and come out looking just like everyone else. Almost worse, the Rolling Stones would have turned out looking, and probably sounding, like the Dave Clark Five!