FEATURE:
Please Please Us…
The Beatles' Debut Album at Sixty, and the Idea of an Anniversary Event
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WHILST few fans of The Beatles…
PHOTO CREDIT: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
would put their 1963 debut, Please Please Me, at the top of the pile, it is undoubtably one of the most important and revolutionary albums in history. I actually love Please Please Me and, as it is sixty on 22nd March, I have been wondering how the world will mark it. Go and buy it on vinyl, because it is as terrific album that captures the energy, excitement and promise of this young band who would soon change the trajectory and sound of Pop music. Most of the songs on the albums were captured during a single session on 11th February, 1963. I love how it was recorded a month before its release. With such urgency and efficiency, this amazing debut is more like a live album compared to a studio one. Studio albums find artists working weeks and months to put their songs together, do overdubs and different takes. Here, there is the feeling and sound of a band getting songs down quickly in order to capture a simplicity and electricity that was necessary. The Beatles would experiment and push the studio to the limit soon enough, but their debut is a terrific album that makes you feel like you are watching the band in concert!
I want to get to an idea or hope. Hoping that people celebrate this huge anniversary of an album that changed music. I will start with an article and a couple of reviews for the stunning Please Please Me. Far Out Magazine wrote a feature a year ago that collates the words of The Beatles band members. Their thoughts and recollections of a debut album that would thrust them into the limelight:
“This album was one of the most revolutionary moments in music. It set pop music on course for the golden horizons yonder and shaped rock ‘n’ roll for decades to come. That’s because, with Please, Please Me, an album jam-packed with The Beatles own compositions, the Fab Four confirmed that things would never be the same again. While there are endless reviews and revised reports of this landmark moment in music, we think it’s best to hear about the album in the words of those who helped create it. So, below, we’re looking back at The Beatles’ debut album through the words of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
The record was revolutionary for two main reasons. Firstly, the album contained, by and large, songs that The Beatles themselves had composed which was, at the time, a more than unusual occurrence — pop groups were expected to ‘play the hits’. Equally as innovative was George Martin’s employment and his desire to ensure that the album sounded like attending a Beatles concert.
The Fab Four had made a name for themselves on the stage. Not only in their native Liverpool and the hallowed Cavern Club but across the channel in mainland Europe too, where they had a particularly interesting residency along with the great and good of the music scene in the unlikely pop mecca of Hamburg. As well as their songwriting, the band’s incredible live shows had been a huge part of why they were signed and given the opportunity at a live album in the first place.
Lennon remembered the album back in 1976 as a true to life occurrence. “That record tried to capture us live,” the bespectacled Beatle recalled, “And was the nearest thing to what we might have sounded like to the audiences in Hamburg and Liverpool. You don’t get that live atmosphere of the crowd stomping on the beat with you, but it’s the nearest you can get to knowing what we sounded like before we became the ‘clever’ Beatles.” The album captures the band’s intensity in their salad days, with all the sweat and joy of performing live pouring out of the LP with every rotation.
The reason George Martin was able to capture so much of that visceral showmanship was that the band had reacted well to the arduous conditions for recording. Unlike most artists today, the group were shovelled into the studios for a searing day of sessions. “The whole album only took a day… so it was amazingly cheap, no-messing, just a massive effort from us. But we were game,” remembered McCartney in 1988 of the experience. “We’d been to Hamburg for Christ’s sake, we’d stayed up all night, it was no big deal. We started at ten in the morning and finished at ten at night… it sounded like a working day to us! And at the end of the day, you had your album.”
Adding: “There’s many a person now who would love to be able to say that. Me included.”
While the thrill of making an album emboldened the band, that didn’t mean they let their artistry slip away. In 1963, Lennon recalled the experience: “We sang for twelve hours nonstop. Waiting to hear the LP played back was one of our most worrying experiences. We’re perfectionists. If it had come out any old way we’d have wanted to do it all over again. As it happens we’re very happy with the result.” Considering the songs on offer, we’re not surprised that Lennon was sated.
Largely buoyed by Lennon-McCartney’s powerhouse partnership, The Beatles revolutionised pop music by writing and performing their own songs. At the time, it was a partnership that seemed as steadfast as it was successful. Lennon could see the value of his partnership from the very beginning, speaking in 1963: “All the better songs that we have written — the ones that anybody wants to hear — those were co-written. Sometimes half the words are written by me, and he’ll finish them off. We go along a word each, practically.”
There are some serious songs on the album too. The record’s opener, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, is one of the Fab Four’s most beloved songs. A track which came out of the duo ditching school, “We sagged off school and wrote it on guitars,” remembered McCartney in 1988. “I remember I had the lyrics, ‘Just seventeen/Never been a beauty queen,’ which John… it was one of the first times he ever went, ‘What? Must change that!’ And it became, ‘you know what I mean.'” Starting with a bang, the songs only go further to showcase the talent at hand.
Next on the record was ‘Misery’, a song originally written for Helen Shapiro; it now works as a perfect representation of a John Lennon pop song, Lennon himself telling David Sheff: “It was kind of a John song.” Another track that was Lennon’s song “completely” was the title track from the record ‘Please, Please Me’. Though it was an original composition, the song was heavily inspired by one rocker: “It was my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song, would you believe it? I wrote it in the bedroom in my house at Menlove Avenue, which was my auntie’s place. I heard Roy Orbison doing ‘Only The Lonely’ or something. That’s where that came from.”
The next track on the album also showed the band’s promise, as ‘Love Me Do’ remains a seminal moment for the entire band, including McCartney, who recalled in 1982: “In Hamburg, we clicked… At the Cavern, we clicked.. but if you want to know when we ‘knew’ we’d arrived, it was getting in the charts with ‘Love Me Do.’ That was the one. It gave us somewhere to go.” Coming to the studio to lay down the tracks for ‘Love Me Do’, The Beatles approached their first real recording session, “I was very nervous, I remember,” said McCartney some years later. “John was supposed to sing the lead, but they changed their minds and asked me to sing lead at the last minute, because they wanted John to play harmonica. Until then, we hadn’t rehearsed with a harmonica; George Martin started arranging it on the spot. It was very nerve-wracking.”
‘P.S. I Love You’ may not go down in history as the best Beatles number of all time, but it did set a precedent for a songwriting trick McCartney would employ through a lot of his career: “A theme song based on a letter… It was pretty much mine. I don’t think John had much of a hand in it. There are certain themes that are easier than others to hang a song on, and a letter is one of them.” It shows that while the band weren’t relying on other people’s material exclusively, they knew how to play the commercial side of the game. One aspect of which was ensuring that each band member — who were being marketed similarly to something we’d align with a boyband — had a song to sing. ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’ was penned for Harrison to add his vocals to, something he didn’t exactly relish: “I didn’t like the vocal on it. I didn’t know how to sing”.
I am keen to move on. A number one in the U.K., it would be a little while until The Beatles stormed America. In fact, when they first arrived in February 1964, they were met with thousands of screaming fans. It did not take long for them to conquer the planet! Their debut album, whilst not as revered as their classic work, is a historic album in its own right. It kickstarted something profound, seismic and revolutionary. This is what AllMusic had to say in their review of Please Please Me:
“Once "Please Please Me" rocketed to number one, the Beatles rushed to deliver a debut album, bashing out Please Please Me in a day. Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh, precisely because of its intense origins. As the songs rush past, it's easy to get wrapped up in the sound of the record itself without realizing how the album effectively summarizes the band's eclectic influences. Naturally, the influences shine through their covers, all of which are unconventional and illustrate the group's superior taste. There's a love of girl groups, vocal harmonies, sophisticated popcraft, schmaltz, R&B;, and hard-driving rock & roll, which is enough to make Please Please Me impressive, but what makes it astonishing is how these elements converge in the originals. "I Saw Here Standing There" is one of their best rockers, yet it has surprising harmonies and melodic progressions. "Misery" and "There's a Place" grow out of the girl group tradition without being tied to it.
A few of their originals, such as "Do You Want to Know a Secret" and the pleasantly light "P.S. I Love You," have dated slightly, but endearingly so, since they're infused with cheerful innocence and enthusiasm. And there is an innocence to Please Please Me. The Beatles may have played notoriously rough dives in Hamburg, but the only way you could tell that on their first album was how the constant gigging turned the group into a tight, professional band that could run through their set list at the drop of a hat with boundless energy. It's no surprise that Lennon had shouted himself hoarse by the end of the session, barely getting through "Twist and Shout," the most famous single take in rock history. He simply got caught up in the music, just like generations of listeners did”.
Before moving along, I want to source Pitchfork’s review of The Beatles’ 1963 debut album. I listen to it now and I still get chills and excitement. The same things I was feeling as a child decades ago. It has that power and ability to take you back to your childhood! I imagine the band recording at EMI (Abbey Road Studios as it would be renamed) and hearing the album back after a long day of recording. It must have been both tiring and thrilling! Please Please Me is such a fresh and exhilarating experience. With great original songs from John Lennon and Paul McCartney together with cover versions, it is an eclectic and huge compelling statement:
“Besides, at the start they weren't so different at all. Britain in the early 1960s swarmed with rock'n'roll bands, creating local scenes like the Mersey Sound the Beatles dominated. Rock'n'roll hadn't died out, but it had become unfashionable in showbiz eyes-- a small-club dance music that thrived on local passion. It was raucous, even charming in a quaint way, but there was no money in it for the big-timers of the London music biz.
At the same time the record market was booming. The Conservative UK government of the late 1950s had deliberately stoked a consumer boom: Aping the post-war consumption of the U.S., more British households than ever owned TVs, washing machines, and record players. The number of singles sold in Britain increased eightfold between the emergence of Elvis in 1956 and the Beatles in '63. Combine this massively increased potential audience with the local popularity of rock'n'roll and some kind of crossover success seems inevitable-- the idiocy of the Decca label in turning down the Beatles isn't so much a businessman's failure to recognize genius as a businessman's failure to recognize good business.
The Beatles' life as a rock'n'roll band-- their fabled first acts in Hamburg clubs and Liverpool's Cavern-- is mostly lost to us. The party line on Please Please Me is that it's a raw, high-energy run-through of their live set, but to me this seems just a little disingenuous. It's not even that the album, by necessity, can't reflect the group's two-hour shows and the frenzy-baiting lengths they'd push setpiece songs to. It's that the disc was recorded on the back of a #1 single, and there was a big new audience to consider when selecting material. There's rawness here-- rawness they never quite captured again-- but a lot of sweetness too, particularly in Lennon-McCartney originals "P.S. I Love You" and "Do You Want to Know a Secret".
Rather than an accurate document of an evening with the pre-fame Beatles, Please Please Me works more like a DJ mix album-- a truncated, idealized teaser for their early live shows. More than any other of their records, Please Please Me is a dance music album. Almost everything on the record, even ballads like "Anna", has a swing and a kick born from the hard experience of making a small club move. And it starts and ends with "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Twist and Shout", the most kinetic, danceable tracks they ever made.
The "evening with the band" feel makes Please Please Me a more coherent experience than other cover-heavy Beatles albums: Here other peoples' songs work not just as filler, but as markers for styles and effects the band admired and might return to as songwriters. McCartney, for instance, would go on to write songs whose drama and emotional nuance would embarrass "A Taste of Honey", but for now he puts his all into its cornball melodrama, and the song fits.
Please Please Me also works as a unit because the group's vocals are so great. At least some of this is due to the remastering, which makes the Beatles' singing thrillingly up-close and immediate. I'd never really paid much attention to "Chains" and the Ringo-led "Boys", but the clearer vocals on each-- "Chains"' sarcastic snarls and the harmonies helping Ringo out-- make them far more compelling.
And as you'd imagine, making the voices more vivid means Lennon's kamikaze take on "Twist and Shout" sounds even more ferocious. Done in one cut at the session's end, it could have been an unusable wreck. Instead, it's one of the group's most famous triumphs. This sums up the Beatles for me. Rather than a band whose path to the top was ordained by their genius, they were a group with the luck to meet opportunities, the wit to recognize them, the drive to seize them, and the talent to fulfil them. Please Please Me is the sound of them doing all four”.
What is going to happen on 22nd March? I don’t think Giles Martin (son of The Beatles’ late producer George) will reissue anything or remaster the album. There can’t be anything in the vaults from that brief time the band recorded the album! Perhaps there is the odd scrap but, compared with Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Abbey Road, there aren’t these alternate takes and in-studio chat. You get the sense that budget was limited and there could be no real wastage or any form of experimenting and feeling their way into the songs. This was a band who had performed a lot of the songs live enough times so that thewy felt pretty intuitive and as good as they were going to be. Maybe there are live recordings or the possibility of remastering the band’s December 1962 set at the Star-Club in Hamburg. That would be an intriguing addition! I do hope that there is a proper celebration or something happening. I have not heard whether there are new podcasts or any radio broadcasts that celebrate sixty years of Please Please Me. I know BBC Radio 6 Music do all-day celebrations like this, so maybe they will play the album in full. I love the contrasts on Please Please Me. The first and last songs see the chief songwriters take lead. On Twist and Shout Lennon, with a very sore throat, provides such a raw performance of a song done in a single take. Now considered one of the most important vocals in Rock and Roll. Please Please Me started with Paul McCartney counting “1,2,3,4!” on I Saw Her Standing There and, with it, he ignited…
A music revolution.
