“Like a broadcast”: The Beatles album recorded in a single day
It’s near-impossible to put The Beatles’ music into just one box. For all of the massive hits that they had, none of them sounded alike throughout their career, and by the time they had become a studio-only act in the back half of the 1960s, there was no real limit to where they could go anymore. When they first cut their teeth in the studio, though, they were far from the ‘clever Beatles’, and George Martin felt that if he were to hone them, it would be best to treat Please Please Me like a glorified concert.
Because as much as they wanted to be superstars, Martin didn’t see the raw musical talent on display just yet. There were pieces of their sound that seemed endearing, but Martin saw the one thing that most artists can’t recreate: potential. It was just a matter of directing once they ducked into Abbey Road Studios to work on a full album of material.
But despite the Fab Four turning the medium into an art form, the modern LP was far from everyone’s first choice to listen to music. Frank Sinatra had flirted with the idea of making a conceptual piece on In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, but for most rock and roll acts, it was just looked at as a collection of potential singles and a few deep cuts thrown in for good measure.
Now that they had a record in the charts with ‘Love Me Do’, Martin suggested that their first album be like a recreation of what they had done live to capitalise on the momentum, saying, “I knew what they could do. I had seen all of their stuff at The Cavern. I said, ‘We need this album out very quickly. Why don’t you come into the studio and just roll it off, like a broadcast.’”
When working through every track, though, the Fab Four had not time to waste. Instead of spending a few weeks woodshedding their songs, much of Please Please Me was completely in one 11-hour session in February 1963, with them whistling through their entire set and featuring Lennon shirtless on the control room floor screaming his lungs out to The Isley Brothers’s ‘Twist and Shout’.
So what everyone got on that first record was the equivalent of The Beatles’ first live album. Everything was still in place to overdub things when needed, but compared to the extravagant stuff that they would get up to on ‘I Am The Walrus’, this was the closest that people would ever come to hearing what the Fab Four sounded like in the middle of the Cavern Club circa 1962, especially when they run through cover versions of ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Baby It’s You’.
And while they do wear their influences on their sleeves, the album does keep things fairly eclectic. Looking through their live repertoire, most people weren’t thinking of taking a swing at the Broadway standard ‘A Taste of Honey’, and even in their original material, there were often a few uncommon chords going on in between the typical rock and roll progressions, like the C#7 chord that sticks out like a sore thumb at the very beginning of ‘PS I Love You’.
Still, you can hear them slowly inching towards something bigger on some of their original compositions as well. ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was the best indication of what the group could do in just under three minutes, but deeper cuts like ‘There’s A Place’ took that concept into new territory, combining ballad-style harmonies with a lyric that’s borderline psychedelic years before people were putting flowers in their hair.
It does seem more than a little bit rough compared to the likes of Sgt Pepper and Revolver, but that’s simply because that band didn’t exist yet. They had to grow into those kinds of musical thinkers, and with that potential that Martin saw in them, they were bound to go into bold new directions right after completing this record.
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