Paul McCartney (22 page)

As the A-side–the one considered more likely to chart–Martin had chosen ‘Love Me Do’, an early song of Paul’s, originally titled ‘Love Love Me Do’, with atypically rudimentary lyrics and chords, although the title had a faintly literary ring. The B-side was to be ‘P.S. I Love You’, a joint John–Paul memory of writing billets-doux from Hamburg. ‘Yes, “P.S. I Love You” was probably a better song,’ Martin admits now. ‘But it wasn’t a hit.’

Through ‘Love Me Do’ ran a harmonica riff jointly inspired by Bruce Channel’s ‘Hey Baby’ and ‘I Remember You’, the recent UK number one by Frank Ifield, Paul’s main rival for Iris Caldwell’s attention. (Quick off the mark as always, Paul had already added ‘I Remember You’ to the Beatles’ stage act.) Their live version of ‘Love Me Do’ featured John playing the riff and singing the ‘Whoa-oh love me do’ chorus. But on record he didn’t have time to do both, so Paul (though equally capable of playing harmonica) handled the ‘Whoa-oh’s’.

‘Love Me Do’ was scheduled for release on 5 October. At EMI, the fact that it came from Parlophone, and was by such a bizarrely-titled act, led most of the top brass to think it must be a comedy record. On the pop side, no one regarded it as a potential hit and everyone thought the name ‘Beatles’ almost self-destructively terrible. Still, the company promotion machine went through the motions: ahead of release-day, 250 advance copies were circulated among music journalists, radio deejays and television producers, crediting the writers as John Lennon and Paul McArtney.

For the Beatles, their families and hometown fans, it was astounding enough to have a single out and, still more so, to hear it on the radio, even if most of the deejays did add a sarky little dig at their name. So, for the first time, Paul could hear himself through his headphones in bed at 20 Forthlin Road, amid the same nocturnal barking of police dogs that had accompanied his first discovery of Elvis and Little Richard.

But now his favourite of all those rock ‘n’ roll ravers was no longer just a voice from far away. On 12 October, at New Brighton Tower Ballroom, Brian celebrated the release of ‘Love Me Do’ with a marathon concert headlined by Little Richard, who was currently touring Britain, with the Beatles as second on the bill. Merseyside could not mistake the euphoric message: now there was only one person who outranked and out-rocked their boys.

Richard was somewhat different from the anarchic figure of the mid-Fifties, having exchanged his baggy Dayglo suits and liquorice-whip hair for tailored sharkskin and a Nina Simone crop. Paul and John were initially so awed that they dared not even speak to him, let alone ask if they could all be photographed together. Instead, they begged help from Paul’s brother, Mike, who’d proudly brought along his brand-new camera. ‘[Mike] found a hole in the scenery and shot pictures of Richard onstage while we stood in the wings, taking it in turns to try to get in the shot with him,’ Paul would remember. ‘It didn’t work. Mike said Richard moved too fast for him to catch. I think one shot of Ringo and Richard’s shoulder came out.’

Before long, they had forgotten their shyness and were all over the star like pin-collared puppies, plying him with questions. ‘They asked me, “Richard, how does California look?”’ Richard writes in his autobiography, The Quasar of Rock. ‘“Are the buildings in New York real tall? Have you ever met Elvis Presley? Is he nice-looking?”

‘I developed a specially close relationship with Paul McCartney, but me and John couldn’t make it… He would do his no-manners [fart] and jump over and fan it all over the room, and I didn’t like it. He was different from Paul and George–they were sweet. Paul would come in and sit down and just look at me. Like he wouldn’t move his eyes. And he’d say, “Oh, Richard! You’re my idol. Just let me touch you.” He wanted to learn my little holler [i.e. banshee scream] so we sat at the piano going “Ooooh! Ooooh!” until he got it. I once threw my shirt in the audience and Paul went and got one of his best shirts and he said, “Take it, Richard.” I said “I can’t take that” but he insisted, “Please take it, I’ll feel bad if you don’t take it. Just think–Little Richard’s got on my shirt! I can’t believe it!”’

The Little Richard/Beatles night was such a success that Brian staged a second one a week later, this time at the Liverpool Empire. Being on a Sunday, the show was subject to Britain’s arcane sabbath entertainment laws which forbade performers to appear ‘in costume’. To circumvent this, the Beatles simply took off their jackets, revealing shirts in a–for Liverpool–daring shade of pink. ‘When the curtain went back, the stage was in complete darkness,’ Frieda Kelly remembers. ‘Then a spotlight lit up Paul’s face as he sang “Besame Mucho”. I remember thinking, “Wow, the Beatles at the Empire! Now they’ve really made it.”’

All the Beatles’ Cavern following bought ‘Love Me Do’–even those, like Frieda, who didn’t own a record-player. Brian reputedly ordered 10,000 copies for his two Liverpool stores, far more than he could ever sell, having been told that was the quantity needed to get it into the Top 10. Though EMI made no special promotional effort, the single aroused a smattering of interest in the trade press and on radio, slowly climbing the Top 40, breaking into the Top 20 in early November but then stalling at 17. That month, the Beatles were committed to a further two-week stint at the Hamburg Star-Club, which meant going away just when the music media might have stepped up coverage of them. So Britain was only dimly aware of a new band who broke every mould with their peculiar hair and clothes, and whose bassist played an instrument more like a violin, its neck pointing in the wrong direction.

At least EMI now realised they weren’t a comedy act and had potential enough to justify a second single. And George Martin believed he had the very song to do it: a perky ballad called ‘How Do You Do It?’ by the young songwriter Mitch Murray. Martin had sent an acetate of the song to Liverpool for the Beatles to learn before their September recording sessions; it had been taped along with ‘Love Me Do’, indeed for a time earmarked as their debut single. The good humour of the occasion had been slightly marred when John and Paul protested that ‘How Do You Do It?’ wasn’t them and they wanted to do another of their own compositions. ‘When you can write material as good as this, I’ll record it,’ Martin told them icily. ‘But right now we’re going to record this.’

Back in September, they’d submitted another possibility, ‘Please Please Me’, originally conceived by John as an angst-ridden ballad in the style of Roy Orbison and developed by the two of them sharing a piano keyboard. Paul had previously run it past Iris Caldwell, who remembers being far from enthusiastic. ‘It went “Last night I said these words to my girl… you know you never even try, girl…” He asked me what I thought and I said, “I think it’s bloody awful, Paul.”’ When Iris next saw Paul’s rival, Frank Ifield, she tried the words on him. ‘Do I have to worry?’ Ifield asked–i.e. that the song might challenge him in the charts. Iris thought not.

Originally John and Paul had put forward ‘Please Please Me’ as a possible B-side to ‘Love Me Do’. However, George Martin felt it wasn’t right yet and suggested they should work on it some more in a new form which he suggested; speeding up the tempo, using a harmonica riff again and lengthening it by repeating the first verse at the end.

When the Beatles returned to Abbey Road on 26 November, with ‘How Do You Do It?’ still threatening to be their second single, John and Paul persuaded Martin to listen to a new version of ‘Please Please Me’ in which all his suggestions had been followed. The producer agreed to let them tape what was no longer in any way the lachrymose ballad it had started out as. After the eighteenth take, Martin switched on the intercom from a control room that was never again to be so much under his control.

‘Gentlemen,’ he told them, ‘you have just made your first number one.’

‘Did you know he sleeps with his eyes open?’

Since 1963, so many globally-adored pop bands have come and gone–almost every one claimed at the time to be ‘bigger than the Beatles’ or ‘new Beatles’–it’s easy to forget in how many ways the actual Beatles were, and always will be, inimitable.

Their uniqueness, of course, stemmed from their own talent–or, rather, the prodigious joint one of Lennon and McCartney–but it had just as much to do with the Britain of the early 1960s in which they first found fame. An innocent place, it seems in retrospect, still in the iron grip of tradition and class, where almost nothing was known of celebrity culture, mass marketing or hype and no one yet fully realised the commercial power of young people, least of all young people themselves. Like some plump, willing Hamburg barmaid in their former life, it was all theirs for the taking.

Previous British pop stars like Cliff Richard and Billy Fury had had to struggle for years to reach a family audience, but with John, Paul, George and Ringo it took only months. In late 1962, they were just a ‘beat group’ with one minor hit single behind them. Early in 1963, along with ‘Please Please Me’ came a brief burst of notoriety over their clothes and hair, culminating with an incident when they were ejected from a Young Conservatives dance in Carlisle for the crime of wearing black leather jackets. By the end of the year, they had appeared at the London Palladium and in the Royal Variety Show, and no Fleet Street paper that cared about its circulation dared print an uncharitable word about them.

Their appearance, for that time, was more revolutionary than any other pop act band’s had ever been or would be: not just their hair, but the round-collared jackets, the broad grins in place of traditional rock star moodiness, the asymmetric violin bass. Their innovative presentation, not as lead vocalist and sidemen but four (almost) equals, gave them a wholly unforeseen extra power. On top of their collective charm, each had a distinct character appealing to different sections of their audience: there was the ‘clever’ one, the ‘cute’ one, the ‘quiet’ one and what film producer Walter Shenson called ‘the adorable runt of the litter’.

Together they were more articulate, charming and intelligent–above all funnier–than any pop artistes before, but this alone doesn’t explain the British media’s fixation on them during that rainy summer of 1963. It was a season of unremitting hard news, including the Profumo scandal, the biggest train robbery in history, the thwarting of Britain’s attempt to join the European Economic Community, the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and the resulting turmoil within the Tory government. Fleet Street initially turned to ‘Beatlemania’ (a term coined by the Daily Mirror) for a bit of light relief, thereby discovering to its surprise that pop-obsessed teenagers read newspapers, too. From then on, there was no surer way to shift copies.

Today, the ‘-mania’ tag is attached to any pop star, or other sort of star, who draws an ardent crowd: ‘Justin Bieber-mania’, ‘Leonardo DiCaprio-mania’, ‘One Direction-mania’, ‘Prince Harry-mania’, etc.,
etc.
But in the sleepy, orderly Britain of the mid-twentieth century, Beatlemania truly did seem to verge on the psychotic. And it wasn’t just the Mach-speed rise of the band’s records in the charts, the multitudes who queued for their shows, the incessant shrieks that drowned out every song they played, the volleys of jelly babies that were flung at the stage or the rows of seats left drenched in female urine.

Prior to 1963, few Britons of either sex over 25 had any interest in pop, preferring the more adult spheres of jazz or folk. That now changed for ever. In any case, it was possible to like the Beatles without necessarily liking their music. Even the parents most jangled by their records and offended by their hair admitted to their personal charm, as revealed on radio and TV and, later, in their first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night.

Their name became like a verbal virus, spread by screaming teens and drumming headlines, from which no stratum of society seemed immune. Politicians of every party hijacked it to gain publicity for their speeches, psychoanalysts invoked it to support theses about hysteria and mass-suggestibility, vicars linked it tenuously with the Scriptures to arouse Sunday-morning congregations. Pop music finally shed its blue collar as the middle class, the aristocracy and finally even the Royal Family became infected.

Thus, in February 1964, when they set out for America, everyone at home was rooting for them as fervently as for Neville Chamberlain on his flight to Munich three decades earlier. Now their remarkable luck and perfect timing kicked in as never before. For a nation still traumatised by the assassination of its beautiful young president, they proved the perfect diversion. European Beatlemania had nothing on their arrival in New York, forever enshrined on grainy black-and-white film: the demented crowds at JFK Airport; the perfectly pitched wisecracking press conference; the siege of the Plaza Hotel; the appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show watched by a nationwide audience of 70 million during which, in all the city’s five boroughs, crime came to a total standstill with not so much as a car hubcap reported stolen.

That October, Britain elected its first Labour government in 13 years, headed by Harold Wilson, MP for Merseyside’s Huyton constituency (home of Paul’s Auntie Gin). The wily, pipe-puffing Wilson had shamelessly harnessed Beatlemania to secure his narrow victory at the polls. Though actually a Yorkshireman, he milked his Liverpool connections to the utmost and got himself photographed with the Beatles quartet at a charity luncheon, smiling as beatifically as if they were his blood brothers. From then on, politicians of every stripe would attempt to curry favour with young voters by fawning over pop stars.

Labour’s return to power had aroused fears of a return to postwar austerity and gloom. No one dreamed that, rather than food-rationing and chapped lips, Wilsonian socialism would usher in an era more colourful than the Roaring Twenties or the Naughty (Eighteen) Nineties, whose frivolity, creativity and style would resonate into the next century. Still less that Britain would once again enjoy an international prestige it thought it had lost back in the stale, threadbare 1950s: not derived from war and conquest this time around, but from four young musicians and their diffusion of pure happiness.