‘Please Please Me’ by The Beatles

There was already plenty of buzz surrounding The Beatles before they hit the studio, thanks to their exploits in Hamburg and at The Cavern Club. So, when ‘Love Me Do’ was released and launched them to heady heights, George Martin figured they could kill two birds with one stone: save cash on studio time and capture their live energy by recording a record quickly.

“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‘,” Maritn suggested. The band were more than happy to oblige. They rattled off the majority of the work in one single 11-hour shift during the frigid February of 1963. The only thing left for Martin to do was fling on a few overdubs and release it in a hurry.

It was rushed out on March 22nd, and the only hint of its hurriedness was John Lennon’s hoarse voice for the anthemic ‘Twist and Shout’. In the end, that’s where the magic of the track comes from. In fact, that ruggedness defines the magic of the whole record and band, for that matter. You can feel the frenzy of four friends throwing ideas together, and that infectious energy fed into the Beatlemania phenomenon that was almost literally waiting outside the studio.

While they would later take literally ten times longer, recording ‘A Day in the Life’ in an arduous 110-hour experiment, subsequent refinements were always bolstered by the fact they knew they had an 11-hour masterpiece and all the assuredness that brings you under their belt. Just imagine how they felt when they bought themselves 129 days to record Sgt Pepper’s.

‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan‘s penchant for leaving the finer things up to whims and mysticism. Not only did he think that his best songs were the ones that “fell out” of him, but he clearly also figured you’re best off pinning them down in a hurry, too. His self-titled debut album was recorded in two days and was put together with such urgency that the rather slapdash effort meant John Hammond’s Columbia colleagues nicknamed Dylan “Hammond’s folly”.

Needless to say, they were left with pie on their faces. Only two years later, he had changed the world and was already onto his fourth record. Once again, he wanted to get Another Side of Bob Dylan out in a hurry to prove to the public his many multitudes. Studio time was quickly pencilled in with Tom Wilson when he returned to New York City after touring, and Dylan cracked open a few bottles of Beaujolais for the folks present, and rattled off the songs he had written in a whirlwind on the road.

As a result, the songs have an unperturbed feel to them. ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ really does sound like a drunken sea captain softly serenading himself in his bunk as the ship slips over the star-shimmered Atlantic, which is just as well because the recorded was recorded at the same time Dylan likes to write.

He apparently entered the studio at 7pm, and by midnight, he had recorded 14 tracks, 11 of which would form the cracking album, with ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ – the song that Hunter S Thompson would later crown the hippie national anthem – a highly notable offshoot. All in a night’s work, not even a day’s for god’s sake!

‘Black Sabbath’ by Black Sabbath

Heavy metal is a working-class art form born largely from the literal heavy metal factories in the West Midlands. It was in one of these industrial bastards where Tony Iommi lost the finger that, rather poetically, makes his ‘heavy metal’ playing so unique. So, it seems very fitting that the album that launched the genre in earnest, Black Sabbath, was cobbled together on a shoestring budget with the clock-dinging o announce the next beer break in mind.

The Brummie band simply booked out London’s Regent Studio for a day. The day in question was October 16th, 1969. Tony Iommi remembers it well because they had an international gig the next day. However, rather than feeling like this put them under pressure, they figured that they would have time to spare. They were used to pumping out enough sheet metal to rebuild the Titanic before their lunch break, so laying down seven songs was hardly backbreaking.

“We just went in the studio and did it in a day, we played our live set and that was it,” Iommi recalled. “We actually thought a whole day was quite a long time, then off we went the next day to play for £20 in Switzerland.” The beauty of Sabbath lingers somewhere in amongst that. They had just propagated the genre that would lay the 1960s to rest, but they were boozily blase enough about the whole thing to imbue it with a tangible pub rock charm.