Please Please Me
Please Please Me is the debut studio album by English rock band the Beatles. Produced by George Martin, it was released in the United Kingdom on EMI's Parlophone label on 22 March 1963. The album's 14 tracks include cover songs and original material written by the partnership of band members John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
The Beatles had signed with EMI in May 1962 and been assigned to the Parlophone label run by Martin. They released their debut single "Love Me Do" in October, which surprised Martin by reaching number 17 on what would become the official UK singles chart. Impressed, Martin suggested they record a live album and helped arrange their next single, "Please Please Me", which topped the NME singles chart. Finding the Cavern Club, the band's venue in their native Liverpool, unsuitable for recording, Martin switched to a simple studio album. The Beatles recorded Please Please Me in one day at EMI Studios on 11 February 1963, with Martin adding overdubs to "Misery" and "Baby It's You" nine days later. Three of the four songs from their two previously released singles were added to the album, with a new version of "Love Me Do" recorded for the album.
The album was well-received in Britain, where it remained in the Top 10 for over a year, a record for a debut album that stood for half a century. The presence of several songs written by band members Lennon-McCartney was unusual and marked the emergence of a "self-contained rock band". On the other hand, the album was not released in the US, where the band sold poorly for most of 1963; after the stateside emergence of Beatlemania, Vee-Jay Records released a mild abridgment of the album as Introducing... The Beatles in early 1964, while EMI's American label Capitol Records divided the material from Please Please Me across multiple albums. Other countries also received different versions of the album, which continued until 1987, when the entirety of the Beatles catalogue was brought to CD and internationally standardised to the UK albums. Please Please Me remains critically acclaimed; it was voted 39th on Rolling Stones list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" in 2012, and number 622 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums in 2000.
Background
originated in the skiffle scene of Liverpool in the late 1950s, and by 1961 had solidified their lineup with John Lennon on rhythm guitar, Paul McCartney on bass, George Harrison on lead guitar, and Pete Best on drums. The band mostly played cover songs, although Lennon and McCartney had a budding songwriting partnership that also contributed material. After a stint in Hamburg backing English singer Tony Sheridan and releasing a single with Sheridan, "My Bonnie", on which they were credited as "The Beat Brothers", they returned to Liverpool in late 1961. Shortly after their return they were approached by Brian Epstein, a music store manager who recognized the group's local popularity and became the group's new manager. After a failed audition at Decca Records at the beginning of 1962, Epstein was eventually able to sign the group to EMI that May.EMI offered the Beatles a recording contract on its Parlophone label run by George Martin. Though Martin was drawn to the Beatles' personalities and charisma, he was initially unconvinced that they could write hit songs. Their first session, on 6 June, with Best on drums, resulted in no recordings suitable for release. Martin reacted negatively to Best's presence and insisted on the use of a session drummer in his stead; although this was standard procedure at the time, the band took this as a cue to drop Best in favour of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes drummer Ringo Starr. Their second session, on 4 September and now with Starr on drums, produced "Love Me Do", which became their first single several weeks later, and an early version of "Please Please Me". On 11 September, the band re-recorded "Love Me Do" with session drummer Andy White and recorded "P.S. I Love You", which became the B-side to "Love Me Do". They also recorded a sped-up version of "Please Please Me", which Martin believed had hit potential but required more work.
Martin doubted the commercial appeal of "Love Me Do" and was surprised when it reached No. 17 on the British charts in November. Now convinced that the Beatles could write hits, Martin met the Beatles on 16 November and made two suggestions for their upcoming work. First, he suggested that they re-record "Please Please Me" and issue it as the Beatles' second single. Next, he proposed that they record a full album—a recommendation Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn deemed "genuinely mind-boggling" because the Beatles were so new to the music scene and because the album market was dominated by adult buyers, not teenagers. On 26 November, the Beatles held another session for "Please Please Me", after which Martin predicted that they had just made their first number one record.
As the Beatles had extensive stage experience and a large following of local fans in Liverpool, Martin proposed the band could record a live album, primarily of Lennon–McCartney songs at their resident venue, the Cavern Club, in December. Martin planned to attend the Beatles' 18 November Cavern concert to gauge its suitability for recording, though he postponed this visit until 12 December. Upon his visit to the Cavern, Martin decided the acoustics would be unsuitable and decided to record a traditional studio album in February 1963; as the Beatles had already recorded four songs for release, they would record another ten to complete the album. In the meantime, Martin also solicited the Beatles' input for album names; McCartney suggested Off the Beatle Track.
The single "Please Please Me" was released on 11 January 1963 and reached number one on the NME, Melody Maker, and Disc charts. In early February, the group undertook their first national tour, and they planned to record their album during a break in the tour on 11 February.
Recording
Martin asked the band if they had any songs that they could record quickly. According to Martin, "It was a straightforward performance of their stage repertoire – a broadcast, more or less." Initially, a morning and afternoon session only were booked; the evening session was added later. Mark Lewisohn later wrote: "There can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music". Martin oversaw each session on the day, with Norman Smith as first engineer and Richard Langham as second engineer.On 11February 1963, the Beatles arrived with John Lennon suffering from a bad cold, which he attempted to treat with a steady supply of throat lozenges. They began their morning session at 10 am with "There's a Place" and "Seventeen". The band rehearsed during their lunch break and then proceeded with their afternoon session. In that session, Paul McCartney recorded a double-tracked vocal for "A Taste of Honey", George Harrison sang lead on "Do You Want to Know a Secret", and Lennon and McCartney sang co-lead on "Misery". During the evening session, the band recorded covers of "Anna ", "Boys", "Chains" and "Baby It's You". The song "Hold Me Tight" was also recorded during the evening session, but proved "surplus to requirements" and was not included on the album.
At 10 pm, with the studios set to close soon, the day ended with a cover of "Twist and Shout". The song was picked after a discussion in the studio canteen in which numerous songs were suggested before "Twist and Shout" was chosen. The performance, caught on the first take, prompted Martin to say: "I don't know how they do it. We've been recording all day but the longer we go on the better they get." Lennon later remarked, "The last song nearly killed me. My voice wasn't the same for a long time after; every time I swallowed, it was like sandpaper."
At the end of the evening session at 10:30 pm, the Beatles attended a full tape playback in the studio control room. Lennon reflected, "Waiting to hear that LP played back was one of our most worrying experiences.... As it happens, we were very happy with the result. The Beatles were not present during an overdub session on 20 February, during which Martin overdubbed piano on "Misery" and celesta on "Baby It's You".
The day of recording cost approximately £400. Martin said: "There wasn't a lot of money at Parlophone. I was working to an annual budget of £55,000." This budget had to cover all of the artists on Martin's roster. Individually, under a contract with the Musicians' Union, each Beatle collected a session fee of £7 10s for each three-hour session.
Before deciding on the title Please Please Me, Martin considered calling the album Off the Beatle Track, a title he would later use for his own orchestral album of Beatles songs. The album was recorded on a two-track BTR tape machine with most of the instruments on one track and the vocals on the other, allowing Martin to better balance the two in the final mono mix. A stereo mix was also made with one track on the left channel and the other on the right, as well as an added layer of reverb to better blend the two tracks together. The two tracks generally divided the instrumental track from the vocals, with the exception of "Boys", in which the close proximity of Ringo's drums to his vocal microphone placed the drums on the vocal channel.
Two tracks, "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You", were only mixed for mono for the single's release and no stereo versions were made, so, for the stereo version of the album, during the mixing sessions on 25 February 1963, Martin created "mock stereo" versions by emphasising low frequencies on one side and high frequencies on the other. These versions would continue to be made available via compilation albums, and on Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs' half-speed mastered vinyl releases sourced from EMI's original stereo master tapes, until the Beatles' catalogue was standardised and issued on compact disc in 1987, starting with the first four UK albums being issued in their mono versions. However, when Capitol Records issued the second volume of American Beatles albums on compact disc in 2006, the same mock stereo versions that appeared on The Early Beatles were included. When the entire catalogue was remastered for release in 2009, the mono mixes were chosen for inclusion on the stereo reissues, and appear on all releases since, including newer compilations and variations.