Please Please Me

• 1. Introduction

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  Please Please Me cost approximately £400 to record. Producer George Martin later described the session as "a straightforward performance of their stage repertoire - a broadcast, more or less." Martin's entire annual budget at Parlophone ran to £55,000, and that sum had to cover every artist on his roster.

  Historian Mark Lewisohn later wrote that "there can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music." The result was a debut that reshaped British pop's assumptions about who records albums and why.

  The road to that studio had been long and contested. And why did the record that dominated British charts for most of a year go virtually unheard across the Atlantic?

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• 2. From Quarrymen to Parlophone

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  In Hamburg, before any of them had signed a record deal, the Beatles were billed not as themselves but as "The Beat Brothers." They were backing English singer Tony Sheridan, and the credit on their single "My Bonnie" erased the band's name entirely. Back in Liverpool by late 1961, they caught the attention of Brian Epstein. Epstein was a music store manager who recognized their local following and signed on as their manager.

  A failed audition at Decca Records in early 1962 produced no contract. Epstein eventually secured a deal with EMI that May. EMI assigned the band to George Martin's Parlophone label. Martin was drawn to their personalities and charisma. He was not yet convinced they could write commercial hits.

  Their first session with Martin, on the 6th of June 1962, produced nothing suitable for release. Martin reacted negatively to drummer Pete Best and insisted on a session drummer instead. The band replaced Best with Ringo Starr, previously the drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Their second session, on the 4th of September, produced "Love Me Do," which became their first single.

  Martin doubted its chances. He was surprised when "Love Me Do" reached number 17 on the British charts in November 1962. That result convinced him. He met the Beatles on the 16th of November and proposed two things: re-record "Please Please Me" as a single, and make a full album. Released on the 11th of January 1963, the single "Please Please Me" topped the NME, Melody Maker, and Disc charts.

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• 3. The Cover Nobody Planned

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  On the 12th of December 1962, George Martin visited the Cavern Club in Liverpool to determine whether it could serve as a recording venue. His earlier plan had been to capture the band performing live there, drawing primarily from their Lennon-McCartney repertoire, in front of their home audience. The acoustics were unsuitable. Martin decided to record a studio album in February 1963 instead.

  Martin was an honorary fellow of the Zoological Society of London, which operates London Zoo. His first idea for the cover was to photograph the band outside the zoo's insect house. He thought it might make good publicity for both parties. The society turned the request down.

  Photographer Angus McBean was contacted next. He came to EMI's headquarters in Manchester Square and took the photograph of the group looking down from the stairwell. Martin later wrote: "We rang up the legendary theatre photographer Angus McBean, and bingo, he came round and did it there and then."

  In 1969, the Beatles asked McBean to recreate the stairwell shot. That image was intended for the then-planned Get Back album. The project eventually appeared in 1970 as Let It Be, and the 1969 photograph was not used for it. Both the 1969 image and an unused photograph from the 1963 shoot appeared on the retrospective albums 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 in 1973. Another unused photograph from the original 1963 session appeared on The Beatles (No. 1), an EP released on the 1st of November 1963.

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• 4. Twelve Hours at EMI

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  John Lennon arrived at EMI Studios on the 11th of February 1963 with a bad cold, treating it with a steady supply of throat lozenges. Norman Smith served as first engineer and Richard Langham as second. Initially only a morning and an afternoon session had been scheduled. The evening session was added later in the day.

  The band started at 10 am with "There's a Place" and a song called "Seventeen." "Seventeen" was the working title for what became "I Saw Her Standing There." In the afternoon, Paul McCartney recorded a double-tracked vocal for "A Taste of Honey." George Harrison sang lead on "Do You Want to Know a Secret," and Lennon and McCartney shared the lead on "Misery." One track from the evening, "Hold Me Tight," was judged "surplus to requirements" and left off the album.

  The final song of the day was chosen in a discussion in the studio canteen, where numerous titles were considered before "Twist and Shout" was selected. Lennon, his voice already worn from the day, performed it on the first take. Martin later remarked: "I don't know how they do it. We've been recording all day but the longer we go on the better they get."

  Lennon's own account was starker: "The last song nearly killed me. My voice wasn't the same for a long time after; every time I swallowed, it was like sandpaper." At 10:30 pm, the band gathered in the control room for a full tape playback. Lennon described waiting as "one of our most worrying experiences." He added that they were "very happy with the result." Nine days later, Martin returned without the band to overdub piano on "Misery" and celesta on "Baby It's You."

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• 5. Britain and America

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  Parlophone put Please Please Me on sale in the UK on the 22nd of March 1963. By May, it had reached the top of the UK album charts, where it stayed for thirty weeks before being replaced by With the Beatles, the band's second album. The album market at the time was ruled by film soundtracks and easy listening vocalists. A pop debut occupying the summit for that long was without precedent.

  Norman Jopling reviewed the record in the 30th of March 1963 issue of Record Mirror. He called it "surprisingly good and up to standard" and singled out "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Misery" as tracks capable of standing as singles. The album went on to become the first non-soundtrack record to spend more than a year consecutively in the UK top ten. Its run of 62 consecutive weeks in that position stood as a debut record for half a century. That mark fell in April 2013, when Emeli Sandé's Our Version of Events completed its 63rd consecutive week.

  In the United States, the album was almost entirely unknown for most of 1963. EMI's American subsidiary Capitol Records had been offered Beatles recordings since the 1962 release of "Love Me Do" and had repeatedly declined. Vee-Jay Records, a smaller independent label, brought the "Please Please Me" single to American listeners on the 25th of February 1963. It failed to chart.

  Capitol's position changed after "I Want to Hold Your Hand" became a rapid success at Christmas 1963. Vee-Jay, having lost interest after the single's failure, had already released a trimmed version of the album as Introducing... The Beatles in January 1964. Capitol responded with Meet the Beatles!, a modified version of With the Beatles. Most of the remaining Please Please Me material arrived via The Early Beatles in March 1965. "Misery" and "There's a Place" were not available through Capitol until 1980's Rarities.

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• 6. What the Record Built

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  In 2012, Rolling Stone voted Please Please Me the 39th greatest album of all time. Among all Beatles albums, only Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Revolver, Rubber Soul, The Beatles, and Abbey Road ranked higher. Colin Larkin placed it at number 622 in the third edition of his All Time Top 1000 Albums in 2000.

  Rolling Stone credited the originals with establishing what it called "the idea of the self-contained rock band, writing their own hits and playing their own instruments." This was unusual enough at the time to be worth noting. The songs themselves were credited on the original album as "McCartney-Lennon," reversing what later became the standard order.

  Reviewers writing about the 2009 remaster reached for specific terms. Neil McCormick, writing in The Telegraph, described "the sheer accomplishment of their tight, syncopated playing and perfect harmony singing" as "astonishing to behold." Tom Ewing of Pitchfork called it "a raw, high-energy run-through of their early live set." Ewing added that the album captures "the sound of rock'n'roll finding a suddenly large, new audience."

  In 2013, on the album's 50th anniversary, a group of modern artists re-recorded it in a single day, mirroring the original session. Stereophonics took on the opening track, "I Saw Her Standing There." The recordings were broadcast on BBC Radio 2, with a documentary about the exercise airing on BBC Television.

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