The 1963 Beatles song that changed John Lennon forever: “Wasn’t the same”
It was the eleventh hour for The Beatles. After a full day of recording songs for their debut album, Please, Please Me, they were down to their last song. The band had purposefully saved their cover of The Top Notes’ ‘Twist and Shout’ for last, as John Lennon would have to scream his lungs out.
“Someone suggested they do ‘Twist and Shout’ with John taking the lead vocal,” engineer Norman Smith remembered. “But by this time all their throats were 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,” Smith remembered. “John sucked a couple more Zubes (a brand of throat lozenges), had a bit of a gargle with milk and away we went.”
Lennon had been suffering a cold during the recording process and could be heard coughing throughout the sessions. He was just about to lose his voice when the band reached ‘Twist and Shout’, so to prepare himself, Lennon took off his shirt and got down to business.
“John was stripped to the waist to do this most amazingly raucous vocal,” engineer Cris Neal 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!’”
“I knew that ‘Twist and Shout’ was a real larynx-tearer and I said, ‘We’re not going to record that until the very end of the day, because if we record it early on, you’re not going to have any voice left,’” producer George Martin remembered. “So that was the last thing we did that night. We did two takes, and after that John didn’t have any voice left at all. It was good enough for the record, and it needed that linen-ripping sound.
In hindsight, the circumstances almost seem perfectly suited to the song itself. ‘Twist and Shout’ isn’t built on polished vocal technique or delicate phrasing; it thrives on urgency, abandon and the feeling that the singer is pushing themselves beyond their limits. By the time Lennon stepped up to the microphone, he was living the emotions in real time.
That authenticity is part of what has allowed the recording to endure for decades. Countless artists have covered ‘Twist and Shout’, but few have matched the sheer physical commitment captured on The Beatles’ version. Rather than sounding compromised by exhaustion, Lennon’s ravaged voice gave the performance a sense of danger that no amount of studio perfection could have replicated.
Although Martin remembered doing two takes, only the first take is known to have been recorded. A second attempt was started, but Lennon’s voice was completely gone. The version of ‘Twist and Shout’ that appears on Please, Please Me was the only take that The Beatles ever recorded in the studio.
“The last song nearly killed me,” Lennon later remembered. “My voice wasn’t the same for a long time after; every time I swallowed it was like sandpaper. I was always bitterly ashamed of it, because I could sing it better than that; but now it doesn’t bother me. You can hear that I’m just a frantic guy doing his best.”
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