‘It was break or bust’: Abbey Road, throat lozenges, and the frenetic making of the first Beatles album. On the 60th anniversary of ‘Please Please Me’, Mark Beaumont takes a deeper look into the 12 hours and £400 spent making the legendary debut that lit the fuse for Beatlemania and ignited rock’n’roll’s second phase. (Excerpt from Independent)
I’s 10pm on Monday 11 February 1963, and as the Abbey Road clock ticks down the final minutes of an exhausting 12-hour session, John Lennon strips to the waist, doses up on Zubes throat lozenges and throws himself into one final death-or-glory charge into rock’n’roll history.
On this day only the mono version was issued. Its catalogue number was PMC 1201. A stereo version – PCS 3042 – followed on Friday 26 April. Both were released on EMI’s Parlophone subsidiary.
Tlast song nearly killed me,” John Lennon say later, recalling that last-minute take of “Twist and Shout”, which The Beatles managed to squeeze into the closing seconds of the one-day recording session for their debut album Please Please Me.
A second take was abandoned as Lennon’s voice gave out altogether after a full day of howling and harmonising, powering through on throat sweets, milk and the ferocious Hamburg spirit that had seen them through countless late-night rock’n’roll marathons at the Kaiserkeller.
“My voice wasn’t the same for a long time after,” he said. “Every time I swallowed it was like sandpaper. I was always bitterly ashamed of it, because I could sing it better than that; but now it doesn’t bother me. You can hear that I’m just a frantic guy doing his best.”
In fact, the crackling rawness of Lennon’s delivery would come to encapsulate one of the most electrifying debut albums of all time, released 60 years ago today. In just 32 scintillating minutes, The Beatles’ raucous and romantic Merseybeat originals – including “I Saw Her Standing There”, “P.S. I Love You”, “There’s a Place” and the chart-topping title track – jostled excitedly against R&B classics and blue-eyed showtune ballads to historic effect.
Please Please Me would also mark the dawn of a phenomenon. Over its first six weeks, the album wended its way to the top of the UK charts where it set up shop for 30 weeks, eventually only toppled by their second album, With The Beatles.
