It began snowing on Boxing Day, with blizzards raging the length of the country. After that came the big freeze. Northern Europe and large parts of North America are familiar with months of snow and ice, but the weather across Britain during those first two months of 1963 was something new for a country generally used to mild but damp winters. It was so novel that it was thrilling in its severity, as schools stayed closed, the North Sea froze on the beaches, and roads were blocked by snowdrifts in the coldest winter of the century.
John probably didn’t find it quite so exciting, however, as the Beatles’ new nationwide touring schedule took them first up to and around Scotland, and then five hundred miles down to Kent, before returning the two hundred and fifty miles back to Merseyside the following day. Travelling in their van on icy, treacherous roads, with Neil driving, the lucky Beatle in the passenger seat and the three others crammed in the bench seat behind, with three amplifiers, two guitars, a bass, and a drum kit shifting about behind them, it was hardly glamorous. Unable yet to afford hotels they stayed in boarding houses around the country, John sharing a bedroom with George, and Paul with Ringo, before driving on to the next venue the following day.
Inevitably there were arguments and bitching at each other, and disappointment with the sound equipment at the halls in which they played – where often there would only be one microphone. Then there was their slot on the bill, which usually gave them only twenty minutes to sing five or six songs. Compared with the hours played in Hamburg and the Cavern, that was hardly even an audition. But that was what a pop group with a new record to sell and a reputation to build did in 1963, and night by night, week by week, they would see that the crowds were getting bigger and noisier.
Then, on their few brief nights back in Liverpool to relax and reflect, and when John would remember that he had a wife, they couldn’t be unaware that a new spirit was adrift across the country – one of fun, wit and youthful irreverence.
Towards the end of the previous year a new late-night satirical television programme called That Was The Week That Was had been launched on Saturday nights on the BBC, on which Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and his Conservative government were routinely mocked along with Members of Parliament, the clergy, trade union and military chiefs, and an assemblage of foreign leaders. The show’s target was the establishment in all its forms, and no one was sacred or safe from the clever jesters, not even the Queen and the Royal Family.
Unsurprisingly there were immediate gales of protest from older generations who saw satire on the BBC as a display of rank disrespect. But, for those who had grown up after the war, the programme’s firing of darts into the pompous and self-regarding was both astonishing and liberating. Among those young people were, inevitably, the Beatles, especially John, because what was That Was The Week That Was if not a more sophisticated TV version of his schoolboy ‘Daily Howl’? Not that he was able to see much of the programme, in that the Beatles were invariably on stage somewhere on Saturday nights. But, always a keen newspaper reader, he followed the consternation about it with glee as the indignation and resultant headlines grew.
This was the background against which ‘Please Please Me’ was released on Friday, 11 January – Britain, a frozen country but one on the brink of change. With the economy thriving, new jobs in newspapers, television, advertising, fashion, finance and business were, for the first time, becoming available for the young and better educated from all classes. Cheeky working-class photographers with their youthful chat and dazzle were beginning to de-gentrify the stiff and aristocratic images in Vogue, new and ambitious fashion designers, straight from art colleges, were opening boutiques in Chelsea and Carnaby Street, and one of the most popular West End theatre tickets of the day was Beyond The Fringe, a satirical revue written and performed by five Cambridge graduates in their early twenties. The old order was changing in all manner of ways and the Beatles were arriving just in time to join that change. Not that it must have seemed very likely on the nights when they would have to huddle up close together in the van in order not to get frostbite.
Back in London, in his centrally heated office at EMI, very pleased with the overwhelmingly positive reception that ‘Please Please Me’ was getting in the UK, George Martin had wasted no time in sending off a copy to Capitol, which was owned by his EMI employers, in America. This, he was sure, was the recording that could break the Beatles big in the States.
He was swiftly disabused of that notion. Like ‘Love Me Do’ before it, ‘Please Please Me’ was turned down for US release. Capitol, whose big seller then was Frank Sinatra, didn’t think, like Decca, that guitar groups were the coming thing.
But there was something else that reputedly troubled them – the lyrics to ‘Please Please Me’. Surely they were about sex, weren’t they? A plea from a boy to his girlfriend for her to, at the very least, join him in pleasuring each other with some mutual heavy petting? What else could the words mean? ‘Please, please me, like I please you’ – coming immediately after those increasingly urgent pleas to ‘Come on, come on, come on, come on . . .’ Would American disc jockeys even be allowed to play such a song?
In London this interpretation was met with astonishment. The record was soon at number two in the UK charts (at number one in some), was being played on Housewives’ Choice and Children’s Favourites on the BBC Light Programme and had been voted a resounding hit on television’s Juke Box Jury. No one in Britain had suggested for a moment that it might be about sex. Teenagers at school weren’t sniggering to each other about its ‘secret meaning’. It hadn’t occurred to them that it might have one.
Was it possible that John had written some smutty lyrics that no one had noticed? Or was it just a case of some over-cautious American executives reading meanings into the words that had never been intended?
Nearly half a century later, when I asked George Martin if he’d ever thought ‘Please Please Me’ was a song about sex, he replied, ‘Not for a minute.’ Then he smiled. ‘But I dare say it crossed the boys’ minds.’ He would always call the Beatles ‘the boys’.
As it happened, ‘Please Please Me’ did get released in the US, as did ‘Love Me Do’, but not, at that time, by Capitol Records. The small label Tollie took ‘Love Me Do’ and Chicago’s Vee-Jay licensed ‘Please Please Me’. Both flopped on their initial US releases.
The Beatles were obviously aware of their American turn-down, but it would have registered only as a minor blip. Because their lives were very rapidly improving as they left their van and began travelling by bus with other musicians as support for sixteen-year-old Helen Shapiro.
She, as an established star, was in a limousine, but, although she’d had five top ten hits in the previous two years, it must have been a chastening experience for her. The plan was for the Beatles to play just four or five numbers in the first half of the show, and for Helen to close it. But her appeal was already struggling against that of the Beatles. By the time the tour reached Southport in Lancashire, just up the coast from Liverpool, the calls for the Beatles to come back on stage drowned the young star’s performance. Plum Balmforth, then an eighteen-year-old Beatles fan from nearby Ormskirk, couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. ‘It was terrible. The entire cinema was calling for the Beatles to come back on, and she just had to carry on singing and smiling her way through it all.’
The excitement wasn’t hysterical, and wouldn’t be for several more months, but it was an early indication of the way things were going. The Beatles weren’t just a popular band. There were lots of those around. They had something more than that. They were capable of communicating directly with an audience, of instantly conveying a sense of friendship to the kids in the seats, and of arousing a mass shared emotion of genuine good-time happiness. They made an audience feel good. With their strange collarless suits, copied from a Pierre Cardin style, and their hair combed defiantly forward, they were special from the very beginning.
Helen Shapiro would never again have a top twenty record . . . but she probably missed one. Throughout the tour John and Paul were still writing new songs for their first long player – or LP, as twelve-inch albums were called in those days. One of them was ‘Misery’. John got on well with Helen and, as ‘Misery’ was only ever going to be an album filler for the Beatles, he suggested to Dick James that the song might suit her. An approach was duly made, but Helen’s management turned it down without even telling her. It was felt that it was too bleak a subject for a young girl to sing. That was a mistake. A self-obsessed lament like ‘Misery’ was exactly the kind of song for a teenager to sing.
Considering how George Martin had dawdled over the recording and re-recording of ‘Love Me Do’, he was quickly off his marks when, just a month after the release of ‘Please Please Me’, he demanded that the Beatles get back down to London to record their first album. There was no time to lose. And on 11 February, the group took a day off from the tour to go back into the studio. EMI already had four tracks available from the first two singles, so all the Beatles had to do now was to record ten new ones to make up a fourteen-song album. It was a monumental undertaking for which they chose songs that were already in their repertoire, covers of American favourites like the Shirelles’ ‘Baby, It’s You’, with its Burt Bacharach melody, and ‘Boys’, which actually only made sense when a girl group sang it. They gave that one to Ringo to sing. John was never keen on Paul’s predilection for ‘A Taste Of Honey’, but the girls at the Cavern liked it, so that was in. And then there was the Carole King/Gerry Goffin song ‘Chains’, and ‘Anna’ by Arthur Alexander – the R&B songwriter who also wrote ‘Need A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues’, as well as ‘You’d Better Move On’, which the Rolling Stones would soon make their own.
But it was the Lennon and McCartney songs that made the album extraordinary. The previous October, Paul had left behind the car he’d bought himself in Liverpool and hitch-hiked to London for a couple of days with a new girlfriend, Celia Mortimer. While there, he’d come up with ‘I Saw Her Standing There’.
Was he thinking about Celia when he wrote it? Possibly, or maybe not, because in his first version of the song the second line was ‘never been a beauty queen’ – and Celia was a very pretty girl. John didn’t like the line, anyway, when later they sat together at Forthlin Road polishing it. So he offered ‘you know what I mean’ as an alternative. That was better, slightly risqué and almost sexy, suggesting that this girl had all the bloom of youth, yet is suddenly a young woman . . . you know what I mean?
It was chosen to be the opening track of the album, with the count-in ‘one, two, three, four . . .’ by Paul left on the front of the song. Why it wasn’t put aside and kept as the Beatles’ next single is hard to fathom, because, with its ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’ derivation hardly showing, it was certainly strong enough. It’s now considered a Beatles classic.
Probably the second best of the new songs was John’s ‘There’s A Place’ which, borrowing its title from the first line of the West Side Story song ‘Somewhere’, isn’t about anywhere physical at all. Instead it’s a secret place in John’s mind into which he can withdraw when he’s unhappy. Sung as a breakneck duet with Paul, its style would appear to militate against its theme. But its depiction of the imagination as a location, so early in John’s development as a songwriter, is already pointing us back towards Alice In Wonderland – albeit in a rock and roll format. It’s difficult to imagine any other rock band of the time defining a corner of the mind in song in such a way.
He’d been playing around with ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret?’ for a couple of years before finishing it at the little flat that Brian had loaned him and Cynthia. It had been inspired by a song in a Walt Disney film he’d seen as a child, but when it came to recording it, he gave it to George to sing. ‘If they were lousy we gave them to George or Ringo,’ he would tell me later. But this wasn’t a lousy song, so, on this occasion, he was probably following the Beatles’ golden rule that at least one track on the album should be sung by the guitarist. A year later, it would, when released as a single in America, go to the second spot on the Hot Hundred, having already been separately a big British hit for Billy J. Kramer. John didn’t know it then, but he was already writing future hits. ‘Hello Little Girl’, which the Beatles had used as an audition song at Decca but since abandoned, would soon become a UK top ten hit for another Liverpool group, the Fourmost. John had always liked that one ‘because it was the third or fourth song I ever wrote’.
It took the best part of twelve hours for the Beatles to record nine of the songs chosen for the album, but George Martin wasn’t yet happy. He needed, he said, one more rousing rock and roll number. It was over a break in the canteen as the clock ticked past ten at night, and when everyone was exhausted, that New Musical Express journalist Alan Smith, who was then close to the band, suggested the Isley Brothers song ‘Twist And Shout’. Alan, who, like John, wrote for Mersey Beat, had seen how the song was almost impossible to follow when they performed it at the Cavern. After weeks of touring and having been singing all day, John wasn’t sure that he could manage it. Reluctantly, he agreed to make one last effort – and it’s that version that appeared on the album, with John feeling as though he was ripping his vocal cords as he forced himself through the song.
‘It nearly killed me,’ he would remember. ‘My voice wasn’t the same for a long time after . . . Every time I swallowed it was like sandpaper.’ Nor was he satisfied with the take. ‘I was always bitterly ashamed of it because I knew I could sing it better than that . . . But we’d sung for twelve hours, almost non-stop. At the end of the day all we wanted to do was drink pints of milk.’
His voice may have been hurting but John couldn’t deny that he was proud of the album. George Martin had tried to capture the sound of the Beatles live, and the record was the nearest thing to what audiences in Hamburg and Liverpool would have heard. ‘You didn’t get the atmosphere of the crowd stomping on the beat with us,’ John would say, ‘but it came close to what we sounded like before we became the “clever” Beatles.’
The following day the Beatles rejoined the Helen Shapiro tour in Sheffield, before, three weeks later, they were summoned back to London to record their next single, ‘From Me To You’. It went to number one in the charts within two weeks of going on sale.
‘Paul and I wrote this together while on the tour bus . . .’ John would tell me. ‘We were travelling from York to Shrewsbury, just fooling about on the guitar, when we began to get a good melody line . . . I think the first line was mine and we took it from there . . . We nearly didn’t do it, because it was too bluesy. But by the time we’d finished it and George Martin had scored it with harmonica, it was all right.’
Actually, it was more than all right. The lyrics may have been slight boy/girl stuff, but it was John and Paul working eyeball to eyeball, offering phrases and guitar chords until they were both satisfied. And once again there was that trademark falsetto at the end of the middle eight. The use of the falsetto was fashionable on Four Seasons and American doo-wop records, but was rarely heard from British groups.
The flip side of ‘From Me To You’ was ‘Thank You Girl’. ‘We knocked that off as a B-side,’ John would later say. ‘In those days we used to write songs around catch phrases like “tip of my tongue” or “lift up your leg”.’
Later in his career he would be embarrassed by some of the lyrics in the earlier songs, as he would be ambivalent about the teenybopper audience which the group were starting to attract. But, at the time, he was just grateful that he was able to write songs and make records.
It would have been surprising if during those first few weeks of the year music publisher Dick James, who used to say, ‘I used to think of myself as a bit of a songwriter until I met Lennon and McCartney’, hadn’t been congratulating himself. Not only had he published two huge hit songs, he had also made sure that their two writers wouldn’t leave him, as they had left Ardmore and Beechwood after ‘Love Me Do’.
By formalising his agreement with them in a shared publishing company, Northern Songs, in which he held 50 per cent of the shares, John and Paul 20 per cent each and NEMS the remaining 10 per cent, he had guaranteed their loyalty. From his point of view, it had been an inspired move. At the moment, it looked good to the young John and Paul, too. But they wouldn’t always see it that way.