Please Please Me
Please Please Me is the first album recorded by The Beatles. It was rush-released on March 22, 1963, in the United Kingdom to capitalise on the success of the single of the same name.
Two singles had been released by the band: Love Me Do / P.S. I Love You ( October 5, 1962); Please Please Me / Ask Me Why (January 11, 1963). The former reached a respectable number seventeen in the charts, mainly due to heavy sales in the Liverpool area. (Brian Epstein always strenuously denied buying large quantities of unsold discs to help boost sales). There was no official Hit Parade in 1963, but Please Please Me reached number one in most of the pop charts of the time that were published in music-related newspapers. [1] (Record Retailer listed it at number two) and a follow-up debut album had to be put together as quickly as possible.
Ten more tracks were needed to add to the four sides of their first two singles. At 10.00 a.m. on Monday, the 11th of February, at Abbey Road Studios The Beatles and George Martin started recording - in a record 585 minutes - what was (mostly) their stage repertoire in 1963. The three (3-hour) sessions that day produced what is now regarded as a unique representation of the band's Cavern days [2] , as there were very few overdubs and edits. The day ended with a cover of Twist and Shout, which needed to be recorded as a first-take as Lennon had a particularly bad cold and his voice was about to give out.
The band's long residencies in Hamburg served them well and eased their transition into a group that thrived on hard work. The whole day’s session cost only £400. Individually, under a contract with the Musicians Union each Beatle was entitled to collect £7.10.0 session rate, which they duly did. George Martin considered calling the album Off The Beatle Track [3] before Please Please Me was released on Parlophone PCS 3042.
Please Please Me was recorded in mono on a two-track tape recording machine, with all of the instrumentation on one track and the vocals on the other, allowing for a better balance between the two on the final half-inch tape mix-down. (A pseudo stereo mix was made later.)
Please Please Me was officially released on CD on February 26th, 1987, along with three other Beatles' albums: With The Beatles, A Hard Day's Night, and Beatles For Sale.
In 2003, the album was ranked number 39 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
George Martin - being a Fellow of London Zoo - thought that it might be good publicity for the Zoo to have The Beatles pose outside the insect house for the cover of the album. However, the Zoological Society of London turned down Martin’s offer and instead Angus McBean was asked to take the distinctive colour photograph of the group looking down over the stairwell inside EMI’s London headquarters.
The nucleus of The Beatles were John Lennon and Paul McCartney who had become inseparable since first meeting in 1957. Their friendship was based on many things, but their mutual love of music was the driving force. Along with the resilient George Harrison, the journey the three of them were to take together over the next five turbulent years would be chaotic (it even included the heartbreaking sacking of their drummer on the threshold of stardom) but by the end of it, all of the necessary strands would have come together. With the final Beatles line up in place they entered EMI's Abbey Road studios on Tuesday 4th September 1962 to begin an historic recording career that would last until 1969 (August 20th that year being the last session that all four would attend). The Please Please Me LP was recorded in a frantic rush, capturing the incredibly hard working Beatles in a unique moment before everything was about to take off. It also perhaps drew a line under what until then had always seemed to be at the mercy of providence.
