Please Please Me (1)

Somewhere in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by devout Beatles fan Douglas Adams, there’s a neat line that goes ‘it is a well-known and popular fact that...’ and it is certainly true that there are facts which, for whatever reason, do become not just well-known but also popular. People like to repeat them to each other, to the point where they become sufficiently well-known that there’s no longer any point repeating them because everyone knows them already. They may once have been remarkable or interesting, but have long since become banal. Did you know that they only made twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers? That was big for a while, for some reason. Did you know that Santa Claus is red because Coca-Cola decided to depict him that way?

For a time, the all-time #1 banal fact about popular music was that The Beatles recorded their first album in a day. Like a number of banal facts – the Santa/Coke one, for example – this manages the double whammy of being not only banal, but also untrue. Yes, The Beatles were permitted a single day of recording sessions to record Please Please Me – but this was after their second single had started to shift copies, and the A and B-sides of the first two singles were slated for inclusion on the LP. Therefore, more than a quarter of the album was already in the can before that day’s recording started, and the album was in fact made over three sessions, several months apart.

OK, so cutting ten tracks in a day is still no mean feat. But what particularly annoys me about the popularity of the ‘recorded in a day’ myth is that it’s used as a stick with which to beat anybody who takes their time over making an album. Don’t get me wrong – one of my main bugbears with modern music is the rise of the ‘three-year album cycle’ where the artist and label flog one album to death before working on the next one (Nick Cave, bless him, believes that ‘musicians are the laziest bastards in the world, writing 12 songs every two years, and they haven’t got a clue what real work is like’). And yes, I find myself constantly wishing my favourite artists would pull their fingers out and be a little bit more prolific. But The Beatles made better albums than Please Please Me, and they partly did that by spending more time on them.

That’s one reason why, for many years, I didn’t rate the album that much. In some ways Please Please Me is a great demonstration of why recording your album in a day isn’t a great idea – most glaringly, in the fact that Lennon had a heavy cold and this is hilariously obvious on the record. (It also exposes the all-on-one-day myth – on the already-recorded Love Me Do and Please Please Me he’s clear, on Anna (Go To Him), Baby It’s You and particularly There’s A Place he’s audibly impaired.) It’s unthinkable today that any major label would release a record in this state, without calling the vocalist back in to re-do his performances – but this tells us a lot about the state of pop music in 1963. Trends were there to be cashed in on. There’s something to be said for not being too precious, but there’s also something to be said for actually doing things fucking properly.

That said, part of the point of this blog is to avoid the perspective that views The Beatles’ career as a natural progression towards Sgt Pepper. It seems absurd to point it out, but there was a time when The Beatles’ first album was the only Beatles album there was, and it’s worth thinking about it that way when you listen to it. Considering its hacked-out nature, what’s really striking is that it’s not a one-note effort like a lot of quick cash-ins are; it’s not a series of variations on their two hits. One of The Beatles’ strengths, in my view, is their electicism – but I’ve always regarded that as something that they developed as their career went on. Listen to Please Please Me in isolation and you can hear that they were already pretty eclectic, already far more than the tight little rock’n’roll band of Cavern myth. It seems this paid off, as over the summer of 1963 the record proved to have a better shelf life than any British pop album that had come before it.