Please Please Me

I don't listen to Beatles music for a cerebral or spiritual experience, nor to be able to impress anyone with the fact that I can pinpoint when and where they recorded that track - George was recovering from an in-growing toenail, Ringo had just bought a new set of drumsticks. I listen to the Beatles for the emotions I've nurtured over forty years of more. So can I convince you that my passion for a particular album or track will parallel yours? Of course not!

For me, the excitement generated by the Beatles is something I grew up with. I was thirteen when they had their first hit. The first records I ever bought were by the Beatles. I joined the Fan Club. I covered my walls in photos. I was threatened with expulsion from school because of the length of my hair. I even managed, as a teenager in a small Scottish town, to obtain copies of 'Merseybeat' - the Liverpool music paper. It says something about the dynamism of the 60's that Liverpool could have its own music paper (this was way before desktop publishing, the Internet, etc.).

"Please Please Me" was released in March, 1963, and was the Beatles first album ("With the Beatles" would follow). Inspired by the title song reaching number one in the charts, the LP was famously based on their current stage act - compare and contrast these studio recordings with the live version available on the unofficial, "Live at the Star Club" offerings.

These were the days when bands played live: they grew up on the circuit, playing pubs, clubs, and dives, hoping to establish enough of a fan base to secure a recording contract ... and a chance to record someone else's song, maybe cover an already successful US hit.

But the Beatles broke out of this restrictive process. "Please Please Me" combines cover versions of standards with numbers written by Lennon and McCartney, and marks their growing confidence as songwriters.

That was the dynamic attraction of the Beatles. Their music was - remains - raw and exciting. There was something liberating about it. Here were ordinary lads from Liverpool who could write their own stuff, not depend on professional songwriters to grind out hits for them. There was an immediacy about their words. This was the decade when the first working class kids were making their way to university. It was an age of sensed meritocracy and upward mobility. The Beatles were flying the banner for the triumph of talent over elitism, for the victory of regional accents over the sterile BBC English we were normally fed. And the Beatles had seized the baton from the USA and were now setting the cultural initiative for the rest of the world to follow.

And I knew all this at school. My mother sent me to an all boys school. I'd noticed girls. There were a couple I passed every morning who I really noticed. But I'd never talked to one! And here were the Beatles. You could imagine dancing with some mini skirted lassie in the sweaty din of the Cavern Club. These were songs of love and lust, of energy and passion, of time and place.

That's the significance of Beatles music. For a generation, it changed their world. For the future of pop, it set new standards and directions. And for the individual, it established patterns of memories and emotions which are still alive to this day.

The music of the Beatles inscribes a unique history for every fan. Songs which you associate with someone or somewhere special, songs you associate with laughter, pain, love, despair, loss or triumph, songs which provide the punctuation marks to your own life's narrative. Few other artists have come close to this.

"Please Please Me" established a yardstick for the quality of recording: here are songs which have a beat, which are well sung and provide dynamic bass lines, but they are also songs with passion and depth, songs which elevate your spirits and make you feel positive. Still melodically simple, but embodying a universal sentiment, the songs on "Please Please Me" lack artifice or pretence that they are by anyone else but the Beatles. This is assertive music, music with personality. And it's timeless.

Without a doubt one of the greatest rock n roll albums ever made.