With the Beatles

Recorded between July and October 1963 in seven separate sessions (in contrast to the debut's single-day blitz), With the Beatles found the band negotiating Beatlemania while it was happening to them. They were on tour for most of the recording window, breaking off to record then returning to one-night stands. By release the country was in such grip that a Birmingham warehouse-load of LPs had to be moved under police escort.

Norman Smith was again the engineer; the four-track Studer J37, which would define every subsequent Beatles album, had not yet been installed and the band were still working to twin-track. The recording was nevertheless more layered than the debut, with more overdubs and tighter arrangements. Smokey Robinson's harmony stack on You Really Got a Hold on Me; the chiming bell-tone Rickenbacker 12-string George Harrison had picked up in New York; the calypso piano of Till There Was You — these were the band stretching beyond what they could play live in one take.

All My Loving, written words-first by Paul on the tour bus, opened the band's debut Ed Sullivan appearance in February 1964 and so became the literal soundtrack to their American breakthrough. Don't Bother Me, written by George in a sickbed in Bournemouth, marked his arrival as a writer (the first of 22 Harrison compositions on Beatles records). Money (That's What I Want) closed the LP with another lung-shredding Lennon performance to sit beside Twist and Shout.

Released 22 November 1963 — the same day as the assassination of President Kennedy — With the Beatles became the second LP in UK history to sell a million copies. It held UK number one for 21 weeks, displacing Please Please Me, which had held the spot for 30. The half-shadowed black-and-white sleeve by Robert Freeman — shot in a Bournemouth hotel corridor — became the visual shorthand for the band almost immediately, copied for The Rolling Stones' second LP and parodied for decades.

If Please Please Me was a band captured live, With the Beatles was a band beginning to discover what a recording studio could do. The album is built as a rock'n'roll set, but the Smokey-soul ballads point ahead to the introspection of A Hard Day's Night and the studio sophistication that would soon follow.