It’s almost impossible to hear a song like this with fresh ears, but try; try to take yourself back to a dreary British winter in 1963, the nation still not quite out of its post-war doldrum, the culture stagnant, the colours all seemingly bleached into shades of grey. The pop music of the day, doled out in penny packets by a snooty BBC (hence the invention of ocean-borne pirate radio that was just around the corner), was pretty dismal. Cliff Richard and The Shadows, that sort of thing. A group emerging out of Liverpool was generating a lot of excitement in their home town, but their first record, an at best OK, sort of so-so tune called Love Me Do, seemed like it was designed to make the listener wonder why.
Then today’s selection hit the airwaves.
The Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership was still in its early days, when the two of them really did collaborate fully on the songs, writing “eyeball to eyeball” as John once put it, but the original version of Please Please Me seems to have been mostly John’s, and was meant to be a Roy Orbison style lament played at a much slower tempo. George Martin didn’t really like it, telling them there was something there, sure enough, but it sounded too much the dirge to excite the DeeJays. The lads hauled off to rework it, and this is where Paul seems to have come into the mix. Author Ian Leslie, in his recent John & Paul, a Love Story In Song, puts it this way:
Please Please Me is a model for how McCartney would impose himself on his partner’s songs. Through his talents for arranging, singing, and playing, he helped to turn a somewhat maudlin, aggrieved ballad into a cruise missile carrying a payload of joy.
So now it sounded a lot more joyous, sure, but remained at its core an archetypal expression of typically Lennonesque anger, sung by an exasperated boyfriend who’s had it up to here with a girl whom, lets not be coy about it, doesn’t seem to want to give him the sort of sexual satisfaction he claims to be giving her. It’s actually pretty risque for 1963, with lyrics that might just as well read Look, I’m getting you off, why the hell won’t you return the favour, selfish wench, which, actually, they damned near do, barely troubling to disguise the sentiment, yet nobody seems to have noticed at the time, and nobody seems to have made much of it since, as near as I can tell. This guy is well and truly pissed; for God’s sake, the girl doesn’t even try, and it’s driving him straight up the wall. How much is a young man supposed to take, anyway? The exasperation is especially loud and clear during the deft middle eight:
I don’t want to sound complaining
But you know there’s always rain in my heart (in my heart)
I do all the pleasing with you
It’s so hard to reason with you
Whoa, yeah, why do you make me blue?
No matter. The mood is buoyant, the rhythm infectious, the harmonizing delicious, the melodicism captivating. Pause on this a second: this is only their second single, they’re at the very beginning of their hectic, hot-house recording career, yet it’s already all there, everything that made the Beatles what they were, wrapped into a tight little package to form what amounts to a perfect pop song, part girl group, part Buddy Holly, part Everly Brothers (Please Please Me is usually decribed as owing a particular debt to the vocal techniques of the Everlys’ Cathy’s Clown), yet all Beatles, Paul holding the high notes and John taking the lower register as they would for the rest of their time together. Huge advances and major triumphs were just over the horizon, musical and technological innovations that would revolutionize the industry and lead to Lennon and McCartney being hailed as among the greatest songwriters who ever lived – there’s a lot of musical ground between this single and A Day in the Life, sure enough – but listening to this, their first great success, one can’t help but wonder if they ever did it better.
It’s customary to note, at this point, that when the recording session was completed, producer George Martin, perched high above in the booth that overlooked Studio 2, leaned over the microphone and said “Congratulations, gentlemen, you’ve just recorded your first #1.”
So they had. It all starts here.
the needlefish 