AS GEORGE AND THE BANDMATES anticipated the January release of “Please Please Me,” they took great heart in a new, well-timed burst of PR energy behind “Love Me Do.” In addition to the efforts of Kim Bennett—who didn’t know about his upcoming fate with the Beatles’ camp—Brian’s publicity machine succeeded in placing the band on a number of national profile spots, including a key appearance on the popular children’s television show Tuesday Rendezvous, for which the band mimed “Love Me Do.” As a result, the single rebounded from a recent stall to number nineteen. It was an incredible moment, to be sure, as a band from Liverpool, of all places, had landed a top 20 hit. For decades, rampant speculation would persist that Brian had propelled “Love Me Do” into the top 20 by purchasing thousands of copies via NEMS in order to inflate the single’s success. As he later wrote in his autobiography, “There was a rumor—which lingered until it became acceptable currency—that I had bought the disc in bulk to get it into the charts. Possible though this would have been—had I the money, which I hadn’t—I did no such thing, nor ever have. The Beatles, then as now, progressed and succeeded on natural impetus, without benefit of stunt or back-door tricks and I would like to make this quite clear.”1
Meanwhile, as preparations for the band’s first LP continued, George traveled by train to Liverpool on Wednesday, December 12, 1962, with Judy in tow. He was in town for the purpose of testing the Cavern Club’s acoustics when the space was empty. As he strolled about the club, clapping his hands together in order to test the echo, the issues with attempting to make a proper live recording revealed themselves almost instantly. The echo problems notwithstanding, George’s overriding concern turned out to be the basement club’s notorious condensation. “The Cavern would have been a dreadful place to do it,” he later remarked. “It wasn’t a very good acoustic environment—not a very comfortable environment at all really. Very grotty.” After briefly considering his earlier idea about simulating a live setting at Abbey Road, George decided that a prototypical studio album would be their best recourse. In his experience, the optimal number of tracks was fourteen, and the Beatles had already recorded four that could be included on the long-player: “Love Me Do,” “P.S. I Love You,” “Please Please Me,” and “Ask Me Why.” As he and Brian studied the Beatles’ checkered tablecloth of a touring calendar over the coming months, only one date seemed to fit the bill—Monday, February 11. To bring the album to fruition, they would be required to complete ten new tracks in a single day’s worth of sessions.2
During the last week of the year, “Love Me Do” had rebounded after yet another mini-swoon, finally peaking at a respectable number seventeen. At the time, the Beatles were away in Hamburg, finishing out their sixth and final residency in the West German port city, the postwar proving ground where they had toiled, night after night, as Martin sought out the next Cliff Richard in fits of desperation, interspersed with moments of triumph as he pushed his stable of unusual acts beyond industry expectations. Although George had enjoyed plenty of professional highs during his twelve-year career with EMI, the optimism that he felt about the promise of the Beatles had set his ambitions ablaze. Despite all of the excitement playing out in his life as 1962 came to a close, George couldn’t possibly have missed David Frost’s caustic remarks delivered on a late November episode of the satirical BBC program That Was the Week That Was. Clearly drawing on his interview with Martin earlier in the year, Frost took Norrie Paramor to task in front of a national TV audience, flaying the Columbia A&R man for taking credit for the work of other songwriters and reaping scads of residuals in the process. Worse yet, Frost chided Paramor for purposefully reducing pop music to something bland and ordinary. “Norrie is an ordinary man writing ordinary tunes with ordinary words,” Frost deadpanned. “During the last ten years, Norrie Paramor has used all his power and all his influence and made everything ordinary.” The resulting headlines in Melody Maker screamed—in all caps, no less—PARAMOR PILLORIED! It was a brutal diatribe that left the corridors of EMI House in a veritable uproar. While Paramor may have never learned the source of his betrayal, he felt the awful sting of public effacement for months thereafter. As for himself, George could take heart in his incipient work with the Beatles, which—even at this comparatively early stage—was never bland and ordinary. Indeed, compared to the other purveyors of English pop during that era, the four North Country lads were downright revolutionary.3
During their December 1962 visit to Liverpool in order to troubleshoot the Cavern’s usefulness as a soundstage, George and Judy rode about the city with Brian, who gave the A&R man a tour of the local music scene. First up were Liverpool fan favorites Gerry and the Pacemakers, who were playing the Majestic Ballroom in Birkenhead. In contrast to his hesitancy about the Beatles back in February, George boldly encouraged Brian to ferry this new band down to Abbey Road for a January 22, 1963, commercial test that could very well result in a recording contract. Back at the Cavern, George, Judy, and Brian enthusiastically took in the Fourmost, the Beatles’ opening act. The Parlophone head could barely contain himself, telling Brian, “I would like to meet them sometime and see if we can’t make a hit or two.” In short order, George offered to audition the Fourmost, as he had done with Gerry and the Pacemakers that same evening. And that’s when the Beatles took the stage, and George and Judy saw them ply their stage act in person for the very first time. George was mesmerized by what he witnessed there—oh, the place was still “grotty” all right, but quite suddenly he understood the Beatles’ magnetism far more profoundly:
The walls were streaming with condensation. It was amazing that the boys didn’t get electrocuted, because there was water everywhere—a combination of general dampness and sweat, evaporated and re-condensed upon the walls. The atmosphere too was what is frequently, though often inaccurately, known as “electric.” They sang all the rock and roll numbers that they’d copied from American records, and it was very raucous, and the kids loved every minute of it. Up till then there had been nothing to involve young people to quite the same extent. The rock and roll gyrations of Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard were clinical, anemic, even anesthetic, compared with the total commitment of the Beatles, which somehow got down to the very roots of what the kids wanted.
For George, seeing the bandmates’ impact on their audience confirmed what he had experienced firsthand back in June in the Abbey Road control room. And now, sitting with Judy in the audience, he was no doubt experiencing something akin to what Brian had felt back in November 1961 when he saw the group atop this very same stage, when he began to glimpse the vaguest kernel of his future. Could this have been the moment when George saw the germ of his life’s work—however vague and shapeless at this early juncture—unfolding right in front of him?4
For George, the Beatles quite suddenly existed outside of his narrow experience with them back in the confines of Abbey Road Number 2. He found himself transfixed by the band that he had rejected out of hand back in February and only reluctantly signed—literally under duress—in May. The very same group that had failed to leave him “knocked out” had bowled him over in the Cavern Club that night. While his visit to Liverpool had succeeded in ending his plans for making a live recording in the dank basement club, the trip had ultimately emerged as a great triumph for George in more ways than one. On the one hand, George seemed to be genuinely excited by all of the untapped potential lurking on the shores of the River Mersey; yet on the other, he seemed positively determined to overcome the reticence that had colored his thinking when the Beatles originally landed in his lap. No, he would act more precipitously from now on. The old navy man had learned his lesson but good. As for Brian, the Beatles’ manager never harbored any ill will over George’s early standoffishness, already seeing himself as a kind of North Country entrepreneur who could grow a stable of future stars under George’s tutelage given the older man’s much-longer knowledge of the recording industry and its practices. According to George, “Brian thought I was the bee’s knees. He was always on the lookout for new acts, reasoning that if he passed them over to me, I would be able to make a hit record with them. Brian saw us as a dream team: he would manage the artists, I would record them, and Dick James would publish the songs.”5
While George seriously contemplated the notion of developing new talent from the hitherto untapped well of Liverpool beat bands, he found himself raging against a longstanding intracorporation problem with Capitol, EMI’s mammoth American subsidiary. In spite of an established agreement that Capitol had the right of first refusal on the latest wares from Columbia, HMV, and Parlophone, more often than not the stateside executives opted against injecting the EMI output into the American marketplace, a practice over which George had seethed for years. In recent months, he had become especially angered by what he considered to be Capitol’s intentionally manipulative behavior when they deigned to release Beyond the Fringe, one of George’s highly successful comedy juggernauts. As George saw things, Beyond the Fringe received particularly paltry treatment after Capitol reluctantly agreed to release it in the United States only to send the record into the marketplace without any promotional oomph. In a December 31, 1962, memo to Len Wood, George wrote that “this is a serious indictment of Capitol’s ability to promote albums of British artists. I would not wish to recommend Capitol Records to any impresario who was thinking of launching a future British show in the States.”6
Meanwhile, back in the United Kingdom, the “Please Please Me” single was initially dealt a terrible blow by Mother Nature when the nation—indeed, the world—experienced the coldest month of January throughout the twentieth century. Don Wedge of Billboard magazine went so far as the write that “the severe winter conditions which greeted Britain with the New Year had an adverse effect on the record industry. It was worst in Southern England, where all pressing plants are, and distribution became difficult, although it was to an extent counteracted by the reluctance of consumers to venture out shopping.” In London, the Thames froze over, and transportation across the country came to a virtual standstill. As it turned out, the weather actually worked in the Beatles’ favor when, during the second week of the record’s release, many Britons found themselves snowed in. Thanks to the Herculean efforts of Dick James, their new publisher, the Beatles were featured on the January 19, 1963, episode of the nationally syndicated television program Thank Your Lucky Stars, where they performed “Please Please Me” for the massive audience cooped up at home. After achieving that “tremendous coup,” in George’s words, the Parlophone head began to see some much-needed traction from the EMI marketing wing, of which he had long been an acerbic critic. “EMI finally got off their backsides and realized that [I] wasn’t quite so crazy and that this was something worth backing,” he later wrote. “They actually played the record on their Radio Luxembourg program, which was jolly decent of them. It reached the number-one spot very quickly, and suddenly the whole thing snowballed and mushroomed and any other mixed metaphor you care to think of. From that moment, we simply never stood still.” Indeed, in an instant the Beatles fully transformed from a largely regional act into the makings of a national phenomenon. On the strength of their appearance, tour promoter Arthur Howes quickly booked the band for a bevy of British appearances—including their work as a supporting act for Helen Shapiro in February, the same month in which they were scheduled to make their first album. Quite suddenly, the threads of their success were beginning to come together. For his part, George’s prophetic words in November seemed to be ringing true. Could he have found his own Elvis, much less Cliff Richard, at last?7
On Monday, February 11, as “Please Please Me” continued its remarkable upward ascent, the Beatles took a brief respite from their breakneck performance schedule and made their way to Abbey Road Number 2, their new home away from home, where they joined George for one of popular music’s most thrilling days on record. Across 585 minutes—and during three sessions ranging from 10 AM TO 1 PM, 2:30 to 6 PM, and 7:30 to 10:45 PM—the Beatles planned to record the requisite ten songs in order to round out the contents of their first long-player, even going so far as to try their hand at an eleventh for later use. If the unthinkable happened and the group couldn’t finish the LP that day, George had a backup plan up his sleeve. As Norman Smith later remarked, “Naturally, we hoped they would be able to get through everything in one day . . . but if they hadn’t done it, then we would have booked another session later.” While the bandmates were all young men at the time, they were exhausted from their heavy touring schedule. To make matters worse, Lennon suffered from a lingering cold, which had been festering since the Helen Shapiro tour. And there was no question of their work on the album slipping into the following day, as the Beatles were booked for a youth-club dance at the Azena Ballroom on Tuesday night in Sheffield, Yorkshire. But beyond the scheduling pressures at work that day, George recognized an even greater issue involving the band’s shelf life. He knew full well that the Beatles’ remarkable run could end at virtually any time, that there was no guarantee they’d ever see another hit record again. “After the success of ‘Please Please Me,’” George later remarked, “I realized that we had to act very fast to get a long-playing album on the market if we were to cash in on what we had already achieved.”8
In spite of the daunting odds of making an album at such an outlandish pace, George had already developed a remarkable sense of faith in the band at this relatively early juncture. And he was particularly impressed with the increasing quality of their new material. George had originally “thought their songs were inferior to those of the professional writers, but they learnt very quickly. They were like plants in a hothouse: they sprung up rapidly once they got going, particularly after they had some success.” As the session got underway, George understood his role in their professional lives in very specific terms. “At the beginning,” he later wrote, “my input into the Beatles’ records as their recording manager was largely a question of tidying up their own compositions and their cover versions, organizing their arrangements to make them commercial. I taught them the importance of the hook. You had to get people’s attention in the first 10 seconds, and so I would generally get hold of their song and top and tail it—make a beginning and end—and also make sure it ran for about two and a half minutes so that it would fit DJs’ programs. Generally you had two or three verses and the chorus, with maybe an instrumental bridge that I might also organize.”9
As it happens, George’s organizational skills were in high demand on that extraordinary day as the group prepared to capture a barrage of material, largely culled from their live act, on tape. Indeed, George continued to cling to his original concept for the album, later remarking that the LP “was a straightforward performance of their stage repertoire—a broadcast, more or less.” But first, they had to survive the long working day ahead of them. As Norman Smith recalled, the bandmates relied on an odd combination of lozenges and cigarettes to propel them through the day: “They had a big glass jar of Zubes throat sweets on top of the piano, rather like the ones you see in a sweet shop. Paradoxically, by the side of that, was a big carton of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes which they smoked incessantly.” As the Beatles huddled in Number 2, George mapped out a rudimentary song list. At one point, McCartney made a play for recording Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again” or, failing that, trying their hand once more with “Bésame Mucho,” but the Parlophone head refused to yield, preferring to focus the group’s sights on a slew of Lennon-McCartney originals, along with several cover versions from their live repertoire. The surviving outtakes from the February 11 sessions find Martin constantly pressing the bandmates forward. On numerous occasions, he instructed them to try another take after a botched vocal or guitar chord—“And again, from the top”—or ushering them back in line about matters involving tempo and song structure.10
During the morning session, they recorded several takes of the wistful “There’s a Place,” with Lennon on lead vocals, as well as McCartney singing “Seventeen,” the working title for “I Saw Her Standing There,” the rave-up tune that Martin would select to lead off the album. After completing work on the first two original Lennon-McCartney numbers, Martin announced that their lunch break had arrived, and he retired, along with Smith and second engineer Richard Langham, “for a pie and a pint” at the nearby Heroes of Alma pub. For their part, the Beatles lingered behind, sustaining themselves on milk—along with the throat lozenges and cigarettes. Langham was shocked to discover that, upon the EMI staffers’ return, the band had been “playing right through. We couldn’t believe it. We had never seen a group work right through their lunch break before.” As the recording session resumed, the band turned to a cover version of “A Taste of Honey,” the well-known Tony Bennett vehicle. After recording the basic track in five takes with McCartney’s lead vocal accompanied by the band, Martin suggested that the bassist double-track his vocal by singing along with the original. The resulting mix, to McCartney’s great delight, afforded his vocal with a fuller, more layered sound. Harrison sang lead vocals on the next track, the Lennon-McCartney original “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” for which Lennon had drawn his inspiration from Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. After several takes of “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” Martin turned the band’s attentions back to “There’s a Place,” for which he asked Lennon to overdub a harmonica part. Martin continued the forward momentum by asking the bandmates to add handclaps to “Seventeen” before the Beatles prepared to record the Lennon-McCartney original “Misery,” which they had originally penned for Shapiro during their recent tour with the British vocalist. For “Misery,” Martin instructed Smith and Langham to record the song at thirty inches per second instead of the typical fifteen so as to accommodate the addition of a piano track during postproduction. As the Beatles would later discover, Martin had a trick up his sleeve.11
When the group resumed work during the evening session, they tried their hand at recording “Hold Me Tight,” the last Lennon-McCartney number that they would attempt that day. After recording thirteen takes with McCartney on lead vocals, Martin suggested that they set the song aside for future consideration before leading the Beatles through a spate of well-honed cover versions from their live act. After recording a version of Arthur Alexander’s “Anna (Go to Him)” in three takes, they easily dispatched Wes Farrell and Luther Dixon’s “Boys,” which had been popularized by the Shirelles. Featuring Starr on lead vocals, “Boys” was recorded in a single economical take. The Beatles continued their fusillade of cover versions with Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “Chains,” a Brill Building–era composition, with Harrison on lead vocals, which they accomplished in three takes. The band returned to the Shirelles with a cover version of “Baby It’s You” featuring Lennon, with his voice becoming ever more tortured and forced by the minute.
By this point, the clock in Number 2 had ticked past 10 PM, closing time at Abbey Road, and Martin and the Beatles had one more song to record. The group and the EMI staffers took a well-earned break in the studio canteen, where they noshed on coffee and cookies and recommended various songs for consideration, even breaking into a few spirited debates. As Norman Smith later recalled, “Someone suggested that they do ‘Twist and Shout,’ the old Isley Brothers’ number, with John taking the lead vocal. But by this time all their throats were tired and sore—it was 12 hours since we had started working. John’s, in particular, was almost completely gone so we really had to get it right the first time, the Beatles on the studio floor and us in the control room. John sucked a couple more Zubes, had a bit of a gargle with milk and away we went.” For Martin, “Twist and Shout” made perfect sense, being the “one number which always caused a furor in the Cavern.” As the EMI team observed from upstairs in the control room, Lennon stripped off his shirt and approached the microphone. “John absolutely screamed it,” George remembered. “God alone knows what he did to his larynx each time he performed it, because he made a sound rather like tearing flesh. That had to be right on the first take, because I knew perfectly well that if we had to do it a second time it would never be as good.” As it happened, the first take was a thrilling, high-octane rock explosion, with John delivering a searing vocal performance for all time. Up in the booth, Langham was thunderstruck: “I was ready to jump up and down when I heard them singing that. It was an amazing demonstration.”12
Never one to hedge his bets in the recording studio, George signaled the band to attempt a second take, but it was pointless. John’s voice was simply gone. But it scarcely mattered, of course. Take one of “Twist and Shout” had resulted in a recording for the ages. For their part, the Beatles were ecstatic, feeling the full-on rush of a once-in-lifetime performance. As Lennon rested his aching voice, they begged Smith and Langham to stay behind that night with them in the studio to listen to a playback of “Twist and Shout”—the song that Martin would invariably describe as a “real larynx-tearer.” As they finally closed down the studio that evening, the Beatles had completed the principal production work on their first long-player in just under ten hours’ worth of studio time. Just as he had vowed, George had them in and out of Abbey Road in a single day. But the buzz from their landmark sessions continued into the following day. Tape operator Chris Neal, who visited the control room during the recording of “Twist and Shout,” couldn’t stop talking about John’s “amazingly raucous vocal.” As he later recalled, “The next morning Norman Smith and I took a tape around all the studio copying rooms saying to everybody ‘What the hell do you think of this!’ And George Martin was heard to say, ‘I don’t know how they do it. We’ve been recording all day but the longer we go on the better they get.’” It was a sentiment that Martin would repeat, time and time again, as he contemplated their remarkable North Country work ethic. He could only shake his head in recognition as they pushed themselves well beyond any reasonable limits in the service of their creative drive and ambition. Many years later, Langham reflected back on that special night as the Beatles, buoyed by an otherworldly energy, blew through the end of the evening time slot. “Sessions never normally over-ran past 10:00 PM,” Langham recalled. “At 10:05, you’d meet half the musicians on the platform of St. John’s Wood station, going home.” But not the Beatles.13
On Wednesday, February 20, George carried out the postproduction work associated with the LP. With Geoff Emerick in tow and Stuart Eltham, George’s longtime partner on Parlophone’s highly successful comedy records, acting as balance engineer, George set to work on overdubbing additional instrumentation to the Beatles’ “Misery” and “Baby It’s You.” These overdubbing sessions, also known as superimpositions or SIs, were fairly limited in the era of twin-track recording given that any additional recording forced A&R men to “bounce” additional mixes in order to create new recording space for enhancements. In so doing, as each additional “bounce” accrued, the potential for generational loss increased. Contending with the limitations of twin-track recording had proven to be a long-running source of irritation for George, who felt that the studio practice of restricting four-track technology to classical recordings was shortsighted. It was an issue that he would return to, over and over again, with the studio brass over on Hayes Street. But for the time being, he would have to make do. “I found with the Beatles,” said George, “that if I recorded all the rhythm on one track and all the voices on the other, I needn’t worry about losing the voices even if I recorded them at the same time. I could concentrate on getting a really loud rhythm sound, knowing that I could always bring it up or down afterwards to make sure the voices were coming through.”14
For Emerick, watching Martin work turned out to be a revelation. The not-so-old A&R man had learned a trick or two over the years, and one of his favorite techniques involved varispeed recording. As Emerick later recalled, “That session was my first exposure to George Martin’s signature ‘wound-up’ piano—piano recorded at half speed, in unison with guitar, but played an octave lower. The combination produced a kind of magical sound, and it was an insight into a new way of recording—the creation of new tones by combining instruments, and by playing them with the tape sped up or slowed down. George Martin had developed that sound years before I met him, and he used it on a lot of his records.”15
As Emerick and Eltham observed from the control booth in Number 1, Martin worked to enhance Harrison’s opening guitar chord on “Misery” by layering it with his own efforts at the studio’s grand piano. Recording at half speed posed a particular challenge for him, though, as he was forced to synchronize his own playing with the original recording. As Emerick noted, “Overdubbing a half-speed piano is not the easiest thing to do, either, because when you’re monitoring at half speed, it’s hard to keep the rhythm steady. There certainly were more than a few expletives coming from George as he struggled to get the timing down while overdubbing onto the song ‘Misery,’ on both the spread chord that opens the song, and on the little arpeggios and chord stabs that are played throughout.” As the opening strains of “Misery” reveal, George’s piano work adds an attention-grabbing layer of sound, with his notes bristling with the noise of the tiny hammers striking the piano strings as they are being recorded at half speed. To George’s ears, the resulting effect sounded like the music emanating from the windup music boxes of yore. With work on “Misery” complete, George turned to “Baby It’s You,” for which he added a celesta part. As with “Misery,” he hoped to create new blended sounds on “Baby It’s You” by doubling Harrison’s existing guitar part using the bell-like keyboard instrument. “Again, he was trying to get a new tone by blending the two instruments together—and, again, nobody had ever heard a sound like that before,” Emerick recalled. “Later on, he also tried adding some normal-speed piano to the song, but decided it wasn’t necessary, so only the celesta made it to the record.” In this small way, George first introduced the notion of recording artistry onto a Beatles record.16
The bandmates would also be absent during the Abbey Road session on Monday, February 25—Harrison’s twentieth birthday, when the Beatles were riding in a van on their way to the Casino Ballroom in Lord St. Leigh, where Epstein had booked them for a dance party. Back in Number 1, Martin prepared mono and stereo versions of the album, with Smith serving in his regular capacity as balance engineer and A. B. Lincoln working as second engineer. During a pair of lengthy sessions in the control room, Martin and his team selected the best takes of the album’s contents, and then, after completing the editing and sequencing processes, mastered them for release. At one point, he and Smith opted to use a fade-out for “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” which, in its original version, had a full close. In the best take from the February 11 omnibus session, Harrison concluded the number with an added sixth chord, which Martin may have found to be too jarring. Interestingly, it would be the album’s title track that would account for much of the workload that day, as preparing an acceptable stereo mix of “Please Please Me” presented unexpected challenges. The twin-track master tape used to mix the single no longer existed, which required Martin to make a tape-to-tape copy of an earlier, albeit inferior, take of the song. With this version in hand, he skillfully edited in different segments of “Please Please Me” from other takes until he had pieced together a new version, which he subsequently mastered for stereo.
As with the LP, which was recorded for the most part back on February 11, the entire album was mixed in a single day. As Martin looked on, Smith carried out the process and prepared the Beatles’ music for release. “Mind you,” Emerick later recalled, “since it had been recorded in twin-track mono, there wasn’t much for Norman to do except balance the vocal levels against the instruments and tuck in some echo, but he did a fantastic job and it still sounds fresh and exciting.” Years later, Martin explained his decision to record both mono and stereo mixes, which was not a standard EMI practice at the time. “The reason I used the stereo machine in twin-track form was simply to make the mono better, to delay the vital decision of submerging the voices into the background,” he recalled. “I certainly didn’t separate them for people to hear them separate!”17
With the album’s contents in their finished state, the Beatles’ brain trust turned their attentions to marketing the long-player for public consumption on the progressively successful heels of the “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me” singles. Both George and Brian were not keen on using “Please Please Me” as the album’s title, which the bandmates had lobbied for since George promoted the idea of making an LP. During that era, industry practices dictated that A&R men suggest ideas for not only album titles but also the artwork for long-players, along with song order and sequencing. But in George’s world, change was already afoot, so he passed the problem on to the Beatles themselves to concoct a title for their LP debut. Not long thereafter, McCartney helpfully suggested “Off the Beatle Track,” also providing a rudimentary cover design that featured the four Beatles along with two insect antennae poking out from the titular B in Beatles. In an effort to bring McCartney’s idea to fruition, Martin came up with a clever cover idea of his own. As a fellow of the Zoological Society of London, he had made regular trips to the Regent’s Park zoo in the company of Sheena and their family. “Rather stupidly,” George later recalled, “[I] thought that it would be great to have the Beatles photographed outside the insect house. But the zoo people were very stuffy indeed: ‘We don’t allow these kind of photographs on our premises, quite out of keeping with the good taste of the Zoological Society of London,’ so the idea fell down. I bet they regret it now.” With the incredible success of the “Please Please Me” single mounting by the day, the album’s title suddenly seemed moot, as it made obvious sense to synchronize the current marketing of the single with the forthcoming long-player.18
Still in need of album artwork, George turned to Angus McBean, a longtime fixture on the London portrait scene. More important, George knew full well that Angus had shot the first four album-cover photographs for Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Norrie Paramor’s perennial hitmaking machine. As George later recalled, working with Angus was like everything else associated with making the long-player: “We rang up the legendary theatre photographer Angus McBean, and bingo, he came ’round and did it there and then. It was done in an almighty rush, like the music.” On March 5, Angus joined George, Brian, and the bandmates at EMI House in London’s Manchester Square. Several different poses were attempted by Angus, including a shot of the Beatles arrayed on a spiral staircase and, later, another with them goofing around on the steps leading up to Abbey Road Studios. The photograph that was eventually selected for the cover shot was taken by Angus when he first arrived at EMI House. “As I went into the door I was in the staircase well,” he remembered years later. “Someone looked over the banister—I asked if the boys were in the building, and the answer was yes. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘get them to look over, and I will take them from here.’” As George and Brian looked on, the Beatles posed at the top of the stairwell, gazing downward for all time. “I only had my ordinary portrait lens,” said Angus, “so to get the picture, I had to lie flat on my back in the entrance. I took some shots and I said, ‘That’ll do.’”19
The Please Please Me album was released on March 22, 1963. It had taken £400 to produce. For their efforts, the Beatles had been paid the standard Musicians’ Union rate of £7 10s for each of the three February 11 sessions. It would be one of the finest investments that EMI would ever make. As “Please Please Me” remained in heavy rotation atop the singles charts, the long-player enjoyed a slow burn, taking some six months to ring up sales of more than 250,000 copies. Please Please Me finally reached the number-one spot on May 11, marking nearly fifty-two weeks since George had first presented Brian with the Beatles’ penny-per-record agreement. “Waiting to hear that LP played back was one of our most worrying experiences,” John later remarked. “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 were very happy with the result.” With a number-one single and album to the Beatles’ name among their three releases with Martin at the helm, the group had clearly tapped into a new sound. Beat music was fully on the move in the British charts, and Martin had quite suddenly emerged as its chief progenitor. For the first time, he no longer had to gaze at Columbia with envy. EMI’s third label had just scored a bona fide sensation, and Paramor could follow Martin’s lead for a change.20