Operation Acetone: The strange case of The Beatles’ stolen reel-to-reel tapes
In a bizarre case of musical theft, Australian police raided a west Sydney house in 2003 to retrieve stolen rare issues of some of The Beatles’ biggest albums.
Before the introduction of the CD in the early 1980s, the humble cassette had been vinyl’s only medium challenge for nearly a decade. While the 8-track cartridge enjoyed a significant presence in North America, for the committed audiophile, there was the reel-to-reel tape. Considered a specialist format not suited for the typical pop-consuming teenager, record labels rarely issued the stars of the day for reel-to-reel release, which was usually reserved for classical music or select movie soundtracks.
But rock and pop did find their way onto reel-to-reel. While fetching as much as £800 today, original Beatles tapes are highly prized among Fab Four fans, with the American distributor Capitol issuing plenty of the US back-catalogue stretching to Meet the Beatles! available on the rare reel-to-reel format, as well as a plethora of solo efforts from Apple Records.
Such Beatles treasure became embroiled in an international detective case too. A joint investigative effort between the City of London Police and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, under the Operation Acetone moniker, was set up to uncover stolen tapes from the Abbey Road headquarters from over 30 years previously.
There was already some success. 500 tapes had been discovered in the Netherlands, dubbed the ‘Get Back’ sessions, and containing hours of unissued material and studio conversations, leading to the arrest of five people, two thought to have worked at Abbey Road and were seeking as much as £270,000 for the stolen booty.
Somehow, tapes of The Beatles double LP and Abbey Road, as well as original artwork, had found their way to Australia. Extraordinarily, the items were listed on a sales section of a Sydney newspaper, triggering an international tip-off to the New South Wales Police Force. Raiding the site suspected of the piracy racket, the tapes were discovered, and the arrest of a 27-year-old man was made, later released without charge.
While The Beatles’ tape pilfering is likely down to opportune foolishness, the ‘Get Back’ material is thought to have been nicked by a 16-year-old office-boy running errands for Apple Corp in 1970, the case stands as just one example of many criminal efforts to make a quick buck from music’s biggest stars. Hours of studio outtakes from Radiohead’s OK Computer sessions were notoriously hacked and attempted to be sold off, and violin prodigy Min Kym’s coveted Stradivarius model, dating back to the 17th century, was nabbed from a Pret a Manger on London’s Euston Road.
The Beatles had had a lot of bad luck regarding the security of their tapes. Rumours abounded that producer Phil Spector had been hoarding the master tapes of John Lennon’s Rock ‘n’ Roll sessions, Paul and Lina McCartney were robbed at knifepoint and forced to hand over demo material for Band on the Run, and the theme of stolen tapes would form the essential plot device of McCartney’s atrocious 1984 Give My Regards to Broad Street musical drama.
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