What song held the number one spot for the longest in 1963?
Few bands have as many number one songs as The Beatles – and particularly John Lennon and Paul McCartney – do.
Even in the beginning of their careers, just a year after the release of their debut album, they spent longer than any other artist in the number one spot of the UK charts. The song that achieved this was ‘She Loves You’, a track that was a huge fucking step forward not only in terms of commercial success but also in their evolution as songwriters. ‘She Loves You’ was not just the biggest song of 1963; it remains the best-selling single the band ever had in Britain.
When John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote this song, it was still in the tender way they did when they were teenagers, even though by then, they had already become a serious goddamn act in Britain. But this time, McCartney was ready to mix things up.
The Beatles had, up until that point, been writing songs that were odes to the fans. A narrator professing his love for a lady, or a tale of heartbreak told from the singer’s point of view. But McCartney had a revolutionary idea at the time, which involved switching the point of view.
“It wasn’t us anymore, it was moving off the ‘I love you, girl’ or ‘Love me do’, it was a third person, which was a shift away,” McCartney explained. “‘I saw her, and she said to me, to tell you, that she loves you,’ so there’s a little distance we managed to put in it which was quite interesting.”
The groundbreaking nature of the song becomes even more fucking special when you think about the context in which the world-famous duo wrote it. They started writing it while on tour, but the song truly took shape in the same place hundreds of Lennon-McCartney originals had while they were just teens: in McCartney’s childhood home.
As McCartney told James Corden during his viral Carpool Karaoke, when they finished writing the song, they went into the living room to play it for McCartney’s dad, James, who loved the song but had a sweet and amusing suggestion. He told his son that there was “enough of these Americanisms around,” and asked that they sing “She loves you, yes, yes, yes,” instead of “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
The Beatles released ‘She Loves You’ just a couple of months after they wrote it, and the success was almost instant. The band had already had a couple of hits in the UK, but with this song, it became clear they were a force to be reckoned with. No one expected pop groups to last more than a couple of years at the time, but from the beginning, it was clear that The Beatles were different from their contemporaries. This song was perhaps the first warning the world had about what was to come.
Many artists cited this song as a turning point in their careers, including Ozzy Osbourne. Only a couple of years younger than Lennon and McCartney, the Black Sabbath frontman spoke of this song with a devotion he seldom used for anything else. He credited ‘She Loves You’ as the reason he became a musician, as it opened up a new world to him.
The Beatles’ impact on music would be impossible to describe, and this is just what a single one of their earliest songs did to the world. For this, among many reasons, they remain the greatest band to ever exist.
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