It was a combination of Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison.” This is how Lennon tried to name the influences of “Please Please Me”, which was the first Beatles single to reach number 1 in the British charts.
Lennon wrote the song at Aunt Mimi’s house. “I still remember the day clearly, even the pink bedspread on the bed. And I heard ‘Only The Lonely’ or something else by Roy Orbison. That’s how the song came about. And at the same time, I always loved the pun in ‘Please, lend me your ears to my pleas’ (from Bing Crosby’s 1932 song “Please”). I thought the double use of ‘please’ was just clever.”
“If you imagine the song at a much slower pace,” says McCartney, “you have a rough idea of how John planned it. Everything was there: the emphatic high notes, all the hallmarks of a signature Orbison song.”
The “funeral song” still needed speed
“Please Please Me” was one of the tracks the Beatles played to George Martin at their second Abbey Road session on September 11, 1962. Starr recalls that when we recorded it, “I was playing the bass drum and holding maracas in one hand and a tambourine in the other.” He suspects that this faux pas was the reason why Martin preferred to bring a session drummer into the studio for “Love Me Do,” the following recording.
Martin wasn’t impressed with the slow tempo either and called “Please Please Me” a “dream song”. He suggested speeding up the tempo and continuing to work on the arrangements. In general, he wasn’t overly impressed by the Beatles. “Your attempts at songwriting were rubbish,” he later said. “When I heard her first songs, I thought to myself, ‘My God, where can I find a good song for her?’ The first single we released was ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘PS I Love You’ – and that wasn’t exactly Cole Porter.”
“Love Me Do” still turned out to be a hit, and the Beatles were immediately summoned to the studio to work on a follow-up. When they were back at Abbey Road on November 26th, Martin suggested a song called “How Do You Do It” by Mitch Murray. The Beatles tried to persuade him to try his own material, but Martin heard nothing that came close to the Murray song in quality. They suggested “Please Please Me” again and pointed out that they had followed Martin’s suggestion, increasing the tempo and adding a harmonica to echo Harrison’s opening riff.
Suddenly the Beatles spirit was there
The Beatles themselves were convinced that they had now reached a new level. “We had picked up the tempo,” said McCartney, “and suddenly it was there – that driving Beatles spirit.” Lennon later said that “once we got into the studio we couldn’t record the number fast enough because we were like that were euphoric.” And Starr’s stoic back beat also convinced Martin that he had misjudged the drummers’ qualities.
The new version had a magnetic energy and also an unusually sexual aggressiveness. (Perhaps too aggressively: Capitol refused to release the single in the US because they had heard that the lyrics could be interpreted as a hymn to oral sex. Instead, “Please Please Me” was released on the Vee Jay label Chicago.) As the band finished recording their tracks, Martin spoke up over the studio intercom: “Gentlemen, I think you have your first number one.”
He was right: “Please Please Me” was the first of four consecutive No. 1 hits and marked the beginning of Beatlemania in England. The single sold so brilliantly that Brian Epstein interrupted the current tour to send them into the studio for their debut album. On February 11th they returned to Abbey Road for three three-hour sessions and recorded “Please Please Me” – named after their current hit.