The Beatles in Iran

Mehrdad Mehdizadeh was twelve years old the first time he saw their name in a Tehran record shop, spelled out in Persian script. He called them „Beatelha,” and sometimes „Beatles-ha,” tacking a Persian plural ending onto a word that was already plural to begin with. Thirty years later, in 1996, he would describe that jolt of recognition in an essay for the website Iranian.com:

I remember my classmates’ fascination, and the disgust expressed by my parents’ generation. Mehrdad Mehdizadeh, „Beatelha: Rock’s Early Days in Iran,” Iranian.com, January 1996

This was the capital of a different Iran. Tehran in the 1960s, under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was growing into a cosmopolitan metropolis where jazz clubs rose alongside mosques, where state television broadcast programmes recorded in studios on Manuchehri Avenue, and where record companies ran at full tilt. Nobody worried much about copyright or publishing rights back then, at least not in Iran. To put it another way: in the Tehran of 1966 you could walk into a record shop and walk out with a seven inch EP that carried, side by side, tracks by The Beatles, Cliff Richard and Manfred Mann. What was flatly impossible in London or New York for licensing reasons was an everyday thing in Tehran.

The number of these strange, badly pressed, yet utterly unique slabs of vinyl is hard even to count today. We know of more than twenty different Beatles EPs pressed by the three main Tehran labels between 1964 and 1969. How many physical copies of each release survived? Nobody knows. In the summer of 1979, a few months after the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini imposed a categorical ban on broadcasting popular music on state radio and television, declaring in public: „Listening to music makes individuals stupid and dulls and inactivates their brains.” The labels were shut down, and the vinyl was burned.

This story is about that time. And about the records that survived the years of erasure anyway.

Beethoven Co. and the factory of copied rock

To understand how Lennon and McCartney ended up on the sleeves of EPs pressed in a factory owned by a company called Taraneh (Persian for „song”), you have to go back to the end of the 1950s. In 1959, Karim Chamanara, a businessman based on Manuchehri Avenue, began importing into Tehran the first seven inch singles (45 rpm) pressed in Germany for a small Iranian label, AHANG. These were recordings by Persian singers. By 1960 more than two hundred had appeared, distributed by the Beethoven Co. concern in Tehran.

In 1964, a new brand split off from the AHANG operation, by then renamed Ahang-e Rooz („song of the day”), aimed exclusively at the market for Western rock music. It was given a plain name: TOP4. The figure „4” referred to the format of four track EPs, onto which the biggest international hits were loaded. These unique mini albums first appeared without printed sleeves (the earliest series, which includes the rare „Love Me Do” from 1964, was distributed in plain company covers), and later with printed jackets that became the label’s defining visual signature.

The first Iranian Beatles pressing is precisely that „Love Me Do” (EX4024) from 1964.

While production of seven inch discs ran at full steam, Iranian LP pressings were a rarity, and when they did appear, they covered only the biggest albums. That is how Tehran came to press almost the entire Led Zeppelin discography, along with The Beatles album Abba Road (sic). That comical misprint on the Iranian pressing of Abbey Road has passed into collecting legend, and it points to something important: the people pressing these records knew neither the English language, nor the artists they were issuing, nor, least of all, copyright law.

Iran in the 1960s and 1970s had no copyright law covering music (and de facto still does not). That absence of a legal framework made possible a singular phenomenon: various artists EP compilations, gathering performers signed to different labels, which had no chance of appearing anywhere else.

First, TOP4 did not have to negotiate licences with EMI, Parlophone, Apple, Decca, Atlantic or any other concern. Second, it could assemble its EPs freely, drawing tracks from different sources, different countries, different artists. Third, retail prices could be kept at a level affordable for Iranian middle class youth. Fourth, the sound quality was nothing to write home about, because Iran did not buy master tapes from the original producers but simply cut its own masters from available Western pressings.

Thanks to all this, a relatively cheap Beatles catalogue appeared on the Iranian market, available in hundreds of shops in Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz and Shiraz. Today those same copies fetch three figure prices at auction (in euros), though this remains terra incognita for most collectors.

„Beatelha” and a Tehran generation raised on The Beatles

In his 1996 essay, Mehrdad Mehdizadeh offers perhaps the finest non literary testimony of Beatlemania outside the Anglophone world:

I first heard of The Beatles sometime around 1964, when I was a sixth grader in Tehran. Then, when I went to high school, interest in The Beatles grew even more intense. We lived through those years talking about The Beatles, swapping records and sheet music. Many of the young fans were neither dunces nor dropouts, but serious, studious pupils.

On the wave of interest in the Liverpool four, bands sprang up imitating their music. The most famous of them was Black Cats, who played regularly at the Couchini club in Tehran, in hotel restaurants, and sometimes on television too. After 1979 the group’s musicians left the country and, in the 1990s, revived their activity in Los Angeles. There were other groups as well: Ojoobeh-ha, Rebels, The Flowers, Golden Ring, The Littles. They imitated The Shadows, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones. All of them recorded for local labels such as Royal, Iran Gram and Monogram, and all of them disappeared from the music scene after the 1979 revolution.

McCartney and two days in Tehran

The strangest fragment of this whole story has nothing to do with records at all. On 25 March 1968, at 02:10 local time, Qantas flight QF 763 landed at Tehran airport. On board (on the return journey from India) were Paul McCartney, his fiancee Jane Asher, and Neil Aspinall, The Beatles’ assistant.

The next day, McCartney and Asher saw the sights of Tehran. They bought Persian jackets, along with rings for Ringo Starr. They sampled local dishes at a restaurant, and McCartney appeared on a programme on Iranian state television. He also met privately with Vigen Terteryan, the Armenian Iranian pop idol. A photograph from that meeting shows Paul seated with a hookah in Vigen’s house. In the picture Vigen holds a guitar, and beside him sits his brother, the lyricist of many of his songs.

Vigen Terteryan performed his songs mainly in Persian, and also sang in Armenian and English. In 1979, after the Islamic Revolution, he left Iran and settled in California in the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 2003 at the age of 74.

The television interview mentioned above passed into history not for its content but for the tone McCartney brought to the encounter. Mehdizadeh, who most likely watched the broadcast as a teenager, describes it like this:

He did not seem interested in answering questions seriously. He played with his camera and practised a few Persian words he had learned. He was visibly annoyed with the security agents who would not let him take pictures. Some viewers, especially the older generation, were unhappy with McCartney’s manners and thought he was making fun of Iranians as a nation.

Royal, TOP4, Monogram and Orfeh

The three main labels pressing EPs of Beatles songs in Iran had different visual and commercial strategies.

TOP4 issued enormous quantities of records. From the „EX” catalogue numbers (short for „Extended Play”), which ran from EX 4011 (Twist and Shout) to EX 4342 (Let It Be), you can work out a chronology corresponding to the original UK releases, but reaching Iran with a delay of anywhere from a few months to around eighteen months. The records carried black labels with a red and white logo in the form of a stylised letter „T” and silver print. The rarest and most expensive (around 60 EUR (approx. 68 USD) in VG+ condition) among the TOP4 EPs are the mini albums issued on coloured vinyl: Let It Be (EX-4342) was pressed in yellow and red versions, and Come Together (EX-4325) in a multicoloured variant.

Royal was the oldest and most active Persian record label of the 1960s and 1970s. It operated actively until 1975 and pressed more than six thousand tracks with the matrix prefix „AJ.” The Beatles appeared on Royal only sporadically: for example Royal RT 450-9 („Hello Goodbye” alongside the Bee Gees, Neil Diamond and Tommy James) or RT 428 („All You Need Is Love,” the „Sgt. Pepper” reprise, „Baby You’re a Rich Man” and the title track „Sgt. Pepper’s”).

Monogram, in turn, was a smaller label focused mainly on local Iranian recordings. The Beatles appeared on its records twice, on the mini albums Get Back (Monogram 200) and Hey Jude (Monogram 4975/4976).

A curious fact is that in 1969 Monogram also issued the record Give Peace A Chance / Honky Tonk Women (Monogram 221), on which the performance of John Lennon’s solo track „Give Peace a Chance” was credited to The Beatles. This is presumably the only such case anywhere in the world, and the release is now almost impossible to obtain. The same disc also carried two Rolling Stones tracks.

Orfeh was a sister label to Royal, and The Beatles appeared on its releases several times (although the Orfeh logo could sometimes stray onto records issued by Royal, as in the case of All You Need Is Love above). The most interesting release was certainly „Dr Roberts” (Orfeh RT 363) from 1966, with a misprint in the title track and a sleeve familiar from elsewhere.

Sgt. Pepper: the Iranian version as a double EP

The strangest item in the entire Iranian Beatles catalogue is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, issued by TOP4 as a double EP under the numbers EX-4174 and EX-4175, with the following track listing:

Side A: „Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and „With A Little Help From My Friends”
Side B: „Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” and „Getting Better”
Side C: „Lovely Rita” and „Good Morning Good Morning”
Side D: „A Day In The Life”

From the original LP, then, seven tracks out of thirteen were chosen, creating a super mini album aimed at a broad audience. But it should be remembered that this is still a secondary source pressing, a record cut from a master that is a copy of a copy. Either way it is valued at around 250 to 280 EUR (approx. 319 USD) in VG+ condition, though in practice it is completely unobtainable.

Revolution

In February 1979, as the Shah left Iran and Khomeini returned from Neauphle-le-Chateau outside Paris, tens of thousands of Iranian collectors faced the question of what to do with vinyl libraries that held both Western hits and the local pop of Iran’s Golden Era. In the summer of 1979 the answer came officially. Khomeini issued a decree banning the broadcasting of popular music in state media, adding his famous line: „Listening to music makes individuals stupid and dulls and inactivates their brains.” The Ahang-e Rooz, Taraneh and Monogram labels were shut down. Equipment was requisitioned. Warehouse stocks of records were destroyed.

Many private collections survived in hiding, tucked away in attics, stowed in cellars, wrapped in newspaper. Beatles records bearing the TOP4 and Royal labels became, in a sense, not only collectable objects but political ones. Owning them in the early years of the Islamic Republic carried the risk of confiscation. They were kept out of sight. Only in the 1990s, when the regime eased somewhat, did Western music, films and clothing become widely available on the Tehran black market. Some of the collections surfaced then in a handful of shops. In December 2005 the President of Iran once again declared a total ban on broadcasting Western music, and the brief thaw came to an end.

Mehrdad Mehdizadeh closes his essay with these words:

Years went by, The Beatles broke up, and from the mid 1970s Iranian interest in Western popular culture declined. The Iranian Beatles imitation bands broke up too, and those who had founded them, like Shahram Shabpareh, moved towards a new form of music, a blend of Iranian and Western tunes, which today is quite popular and comes mostly out of Los Angeles.

Mehdizadeh wrote those words in January 1996. Thirty years later that same scene, translated into the language of the diaspora, is being documented in compilations such as Tehrangeles Vice from 2025.

Today, on a collector’s shelf in Warsaw or Berlin, those records from Iran are a keepsake of a world that has vanished. A prize catch, a holy grail, the last trace of cosmopolitan Tehran.