Please Please Me

Three months after their UK debut single Love Me Do had limped to number 17, The Beatles arrived at Abbey Road's Studio Two on the morning of 11 February 1963 to make an LP. They had a lunchtime to-do list of ten new tracks. Thirteen hours later they had cut the entire record, fortified by tea, throat lozenges and the residual adrenaline of a touring routine that had just deposited them in London after a one-nighter in Sunderland. Producer George Martin's plan had been the simplest possible: capture the live act. The four were already a tight Hamburg-tested unit; Martin's only intervention was to ask them to start with the song most likely to lose voices first — and that came at the very end with Twist and Shout.

Recording on twin-track Telefunken machines through the valve REDD.37 console, Martin and balance engineer Norman Smith committed the band to tape with minimal artifice — a few overdubs of harmonica and double-tracked vocals, but otherwise the Beatles you would have heard at a Cavern lunchtime in 1962. The session split into three sittings (10am, 2.30pm and 7.30pm). Six original Lennon–McCartney compositions sat alongside eight covers drawn from the band's club set: Motown via the Cookies and Shirelles, Brill Building via Goffin–King, Broadway-by-way-of-Peggy-Lee. The cost of producing a 14-track LP, by Martin's later reckoning, was around £400.

I Saw Her Standing There opens with a bass-heavy McCartney count-in lifted directly from a Larry Williams record. Please Please Me, the second single, became their first UK chart-topper. Twist and Shout — Lennon's last vocal of the day, recorded with a throat full of milk and Zubes — became one of rock's most-imitated screamed-blues performances and would close every Beatles set for the next two years.

Released 22 March 1963, the LP went to UK number one and stayed there for thirty weeks. Its sleeve, shot by Angus McBean from the bottom of the EMI House stairwell on Manchester Square, became one of the most copied images in pop, the band repeating the pose in 1969 for the unfinished Get Back project — an image eventually used on the 1973 1962–66 (Red) compilation.

Please Please Me set the template for British pop LPs that mattered: a band recording its own songs in concert order, with a deliberate vocal showpiece at the climax. Within twelve months it would be supplanted in cultural prominence by the LP that followed it, but its 13-hour creation has remained pop's most-cited example of capturing a moment whole.