Next month marks the 45th anniversary of the Beatles’ debut album, Please Please Me. At 10 a.m. on Monday, February 11, 1963, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and John Lennon walked into EMI’s Abbey Road studios. Less than 12 hours later, Lennon’s throat-rupturing version of “Twist and Shout” brought an end to a recording session that marked a new era in the history of rock ’n’ roll.
Well, yes and no.
It’s questionable whether Please Please Me is really a rock ’n’ roll record at all. For every song that truly rocks (“I Saw Her Standing There,” “Boys” and “Twist and Shout”) there’s at least one that could be filed more comfortably under “Easy Listening” (“Misery,” “Ask Me Why” and even “Love Me Do”). And already, the young McCartney’s predilection for schmaltz is in evidence (“P.S. I Love You” and “A Taste of Honey”).
The choice of songs almost certainly reflects the decision of manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin to promote the Beatles as a pop rather than rock ’n’ roll band. “As soon as we made it the edges were knocked off,” Lennon would later admit. “Brian put us all in suits and all that and we made it very, very big. But we sold out, you know.”
And yet the timing of this release remains significant. You don’t have to agree with Rolling Stone magazine’s decision to rank Please Please Me as the 39th greatest album of all time (it certainly isn’t) or its claim that with it “the Beatles had invented a bracing new sound for a rock band” (they hadn’t), but it does mark the divide between what had gone before and what was yet to come.
For me, however, Please Please Me has special meaning in that I, too, came into the world in 1963. This means that: (a) “the Beatles” as a phenomenon and I are roughly the same age, and always will be; (b) I was more or less oblivious to the Beatles throughout their entire existence (we had one of their LPs — A Hard Day’s Night — in the house at the time); and (c) I have no firsthand memory of the impact that Please Please Me had at the time of its release. Yet that album remains a symbol or artifact of the world I was thrust into, a relic of the specific culture and circumstances that would, for better or worse, shape the broad contours of my life.
I was born into an England that was still resolutely “postwar” in terms of prosperity, outlook and expectations. Not yet part of the European Union, not yet metric, still clinging to an archaic system, three years away from winning its first and only World Cup in soccer, a nation scandalized by the sexual revelations of the Profumo affair, a nation whose pop charts began 1963 under the domination of Cliff Richard and Gerry and the Pacemakers — that was my England.
I know all of this because I looked it up. But I get a sense of my beginnings by listening to the sound of Please Please Me or even just by glimpsing the album’s cover photo of four faces leaning over a balcony, with Lennon smiling for the first and last time on a Beatles record.
It was Proust who came up with the notion of “involuntary memory,” in which a familiar sound, smell or taste can suddenly trigger vivid memories, unbidden by any conscious act of recollection. Please Please Me has that effect for me, except that I obviously do not have any direct memories of 1963 to recall. Instead, it’s more a false involuntary memory, I suppose, one that I’m at a loss to explain. All I know is that it’s impossible for me to see or hear that record without being transported back in time, even if I wasn’t there in the first place.
In recent years, the very future of the album has come into question. The impact of downloading material for free or at vastly reduced cost, as soon as it becomes available, challenges the rules that have governed the music business for the past 40 or 50 years. Broadly speaking, this debate features two main positions.
First, albums may be seen as emblematic of the music industry’s control of product at the expense of the consumer. By determining the timing and terms of an artist’s output, supply is limited and demand (i.e. price) is kept artificially high. What’s more, quality is often compromised as artists fulfil contractual demands by padding their albums with substandard “filler” songs.
Second, and contrary to the above, albums may be seen as an established and enriched format, providing artists with the space and time to develop narratives or reflect moods beyond the confines of a three- or four-minute song. As such, they capture the times and circumstances of their creation, forming a cultural and historical record.
It’s too soon to say what will become of the album. Stripped of its physical existence, however, it will certainly lose the status of artifact that something as lightweight as Please Please Me still has for me 45 years after its release. Whether someone born in 2003 remembers Britney’s “Toxic” in 2048 in quite the same way remains to be seen.
