Who was the first artist to ever cover The Beatles?
When The Beatles first came on the scene, everyone was expecting them to perform covers.
After all, that’s what every band trying to make it in the 1960s was doing. There was a relatively rigorous and uncompromising model for success in those days, with labels ordering burgeoning bands to deliver quick commercial hits that would storm the charts with a quick turnaround, offering plenty of time to go out and entertain live crowds upon release.
It was bulletproof until The Beatles came along and proved it wasn’t. Spearheaded by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the band had a relentless conveyor belt of new songs that, between the four of them, were performed both accurately and rapidly, leaving plenty of time for the previous live shows that labels cared about. All the while, they were producing new music for fans to absorb in the process.
“Because everyone else, all the other bands, knew the cover versions that we knew,” McCartney once explained, “So if they were on before us, we’d hear them doing our act. So we thought we’d got to write our own. So we did, we wrote some terrible little songs, but at least they couldn’t copy them.”
But who copied The Beatles and performed covers of their songs?
By the time they got a chance to record their debut album, Please Please Me, they had mastered the art of quick songwriting and even quicker performing, and so were a force to be reckoned with. In fact, they famously recorded the whole thing in a session that was just shy of ten hours in length.
Aside from the handful of covers that existed on the record, they now had a bank of songs that the world would soon love, and artists would soon want to cover, in a desperate attempt to experience just a modicum of the success The Fab Four did. The music at their disposal was so large, in fact, that they even offered the second track, ‘Misery’, to Helen Shapiro, a 16-year-old singer who toured with The Beatles in ‘63.
When her management turned it down, British singer Kenny Lynch decided to have a stab at recording his own version, despite the band including it in their album, and became officially the first ever person to perform a Beatles cover.
He toured with Shapiro as well but didn’t quite garner the same respect from the band, especially after offering to help Lennon and McCartney with the writing of ‘From Me To You’. The story goes that when the song failed to make any headway, Lynch walked away, declaring, “Well, that’s it. I am not going to write any more of that bloody rubbish with those idiots. They don’t know music from their backsides”.
It wasn’t all lost for Lynch, though, for he did manage to achieve a few chart positions later in his career, but, rather surprisingly, they were covers rather than original material. He did get a chance to work with McCartney again, but in rather muted fashion as he appeared on the sleeve of Wings’ Band on the Run album.
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