One Day, Four Lads, and the Album That Started It All

On February 11, 1963, four young men from Liverpool walked into EMI Studios in London and cut an album in about ten hours. Most bands would need weeks; the Beatles needed one long day, because they'd already played these songs hundreds of times in Hamburg clubs and the Cavern. That session became Please Please Me, rush-released by Parlophone on March 22, 1963 to cash in on the title track's success as a single.

The album's 14 tracks mixed six Lennon-McCartney originals with covers the band loved, from the Shirelles' "Boys" to the Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout" — the last song recorded that day, with John Lennon straining through a raw, hoarse vocal that remains one of rock's great moments. Producer George Martin, who had first signed the band to EMI in 1962, added piano and celesta overdubs to two tracks nine days later, and the four songs from their first two singles — "Love Me Do" and "Please Please Me" among them — rounded out the record. The now-famous cover photo, shot by Angus McBean on the balcony of EMI's headquarters at 20 Manchester Square, showed four beaming faces looking down at the camera. The record ran a lean 31 minutes 59 seconds, and it was the mono edition that hit the shops first — the stereo version followed six weeks later, a common practice in an era when most buyers still owned mono players.

Nobody at the time treated it as history in the making. But when Please Please Me reached number one on the British charts in May 1963, it stayed there for an astonishing 30 weeks, dislodging the film soundtracks and easy-listening singers that had always ruled the album chart — until it was finally replaced by the Beatles' own second album, With the Beatles.

Consider who had made it: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, a lineup that had only settled into place the previous year. Within eighteen months of the album's release they would be mobbed at airports on two continents, and the British Invasion would be underway. The album itself didn't even get an official American release until 1987 — but American listeners had already heard much of it on Vee-Jay's early-1964 LP Introducing... The Beatles, a patched-together version of the record that raced into shops as Beatlemania exploded in the States. It announced that a pop band could matter at album length, and it set up everything that followed: the stadium tours, the studio experiments, the transformation of popular music.

Photo: Dezo Hoffmann for Capitol Records, Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).