Paul might later have exaggerated how many songs they wrote in those early years, but they did write loads. And the songwriting didn’t fall off when they became famous. Far from sitting back on their laurels, idly counting their money and gold discs, or lazily repeating a tried-and-trusted formula, they continued onwards and upwards–and occasionally sideways and backwards. The important thing was to evolve, move on, try something new. Their output from 1963–1965 was prodigious. While travelling hundreds of thousands of miles, performing hundreds of live concerts, recording films, TV shows and interviews, they still managed to bring out album after album of new and wonderful songs.
Their musical talent may have been something they were born with, but arguably the most important elements in the creation of the Beatles’ music were hard work and dedication. Without those ingredients, their legacy would have been puny.
The spark that first brought the band to life, that drew out what was lurking inside, was skiffle. This was home-made, do-it-yourself music, the kind anyone could have a go at, even if they couldn’t play an instrument, or didn’t even have an instrument. Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’, which was a hit in 1956, was a huge influence, encouraging the untrained and the unmusical to have a go, even if all they did was scrape a washboard with a thimble or twang a tea-chest bass. That same year, Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ went to the top of the charts in fourteen countries. Then there was Bill Haley with his ‘Rock Around The Clock’, the theme tune for the film Blackboard Jungle, which had British teenage audiences ripping up cinema seats. Suddenly, the young John, Paul and George had new musical idols whose records they rushed out to buy or borrow, to listen to and work out how it was done.
Their first instinct was to copy. How could it not be? They wanted to reproduce the noises they liked and the words being sung. As they progressed, and they got a bit better on their guitars, their tastes progressed. They became desperate for the latest American rock and roll records.
What was unusual about the coming together of Paul and John was that they moved on almost at once from copying to creating their own versions. But they still followed the format of the day when it came to what constituted a pop song. It had to be just under four minutes long and preferably about boy–girl love. The words didn’t really matter as long as it had a hook, a catchy title or phrase, and an exciting beat or infectious melody. Happy, hopeful, romantic love was the preferred subject matter, though you could also write about the opposite side of the coin–unhappy, miserable love, tears and pain–but not too often or your audience would get fed up and go elsewhere. Regardless of what the song was about, it was vital that you could dance to the tune. Even the unhappy, slow ones. That was about it, really.
John and Paul began writing songs when Paul was still only fifteen, not long after they first met. He would bunk off school and go home to their empty council house at 20 Forthlin Road while his father was at work. John would join him. It became easier for John to spend time there after he started art college in 1958. Nobody, least of all Mimi, knew where he was most of the time.
They would play their guitars, head to head, watching each other, learning new chords, trying out different fingering, copying and criticizing each other. As they made up songs they wrote the titles down in a school exercise book, sometimes with an attempt at trying to list the chord sequence so they would remember it, using their own made-up notation. Each song was marked as ‘another Lennon and McCartney original’. Within a year or so, Paul was boasting that they had already written between seventy and one hundred songs–the number varied, and was usually greatly exaggerated.
There is an early photograph, taken by Paul’s brother Michael, that shows them in the front parlour at Forthlin Road, which was where the piano was, though that can’t be seen in the photograph. They are sitting side by side in front of the fireplace, both in black, like mirror reflections–Paul, being left-handed, holds the guitar under his left arm, while John has his under his right. They seem joined together, one body with two heads. Both are leaning forward, looking down at the notes for a song written in an exercise book lying on the floor in front of them. According to Michael, the song they were playing that day was ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. He says that he once blew the photo up and could see that the first words were in fact ‘He’ and then ‘She’, but these were both crossed out before they settled on ‘I’ saw her standing there.
At one time, John and Paul decided to write a play. ‘It was a serious play,’ so John recalled in a New Musical Express interview in 1963. ‘It was about Jesus coming back to earth today and living in the slums. We called the character Pilchard. It fell through in the end.’
They also wrote short stories together, which indicates that their creative urges were not solely directed towards pop songs. John of course was writing nonsense verse, joke and cartoons from an early age–many of which later emerged in his two books of poems.
Paul and John, left- and right-handers, like mirror reflections, caught composing together by Paul’s brother Michael in 1962. On the floor is an exercise book with their earliest songs.
Their joint song writing continued and it led to them making their first primitive record. One day, some time in the summer of 1958, they walked into the little DIY recording studio of an elderly gentleman called Percy Phillips in the Kensington area of Liverpool. On one side they recorded ‘That’ll Be The Day’, Buddy Holly’s 1957 classic, and on the other their own composition, ‘In Spite Of All The Danger’.
It cost them seventeen shillings and sixpence, which worked out at three shillings and sixpence each for the five Quarrymen who took part that day. It was the most they could afford, and they ended up with only one copy of their record. They took turns to have it, a week or so at a time, to show it off to friends and family. The last one to have it was John Duff Lowe, a member of the Quarrymen at the time, a school pal of Paul’s, who played the piano. He kept it for the next two decades, by which time it had been as good as forgotten. When I was interviewing John, Paul and George in 1966–68 for the biography, not one of them mentioned it.
John Duff Lowe, now a retired businessman living in the West Country, remembers it well:
I can clearly recall rehearsing ‘In Spite of All the Danger’ at Paul’s house during our Sunday afternoon rehearsals, and Paul showing me how he wanted me to play bluesy accents–playing a black key with an adjacent white one–which you can clearly hear on the recording.
It ran for four minutes, which we were not supposed to do. This had Percy Phillips pulling his finger across his throat, indicating we had to stop at three minutes fifty seconds. When the original is played, the needle rises a millisecond after George’s last chord, a single strum. He probably did it in the heat of the moment, knowing we had run out of time.
The first recorded song, ‘In Spite Of All The Danger’, by the Beatles, then the Quarrymen, in 1958. Only one copy was ever made.
When the record reappeared in the 1980s it was obvious that, as a unique part of early Beatles history, it was a worth a fortune. It was all set to go to auction but Paul stepped in and bought it privately. Today it is often described as the single most valuable record in history and would be worth a small fortune if it ever came on the market again. In 1995 it was heard for the first time on the Beatles’ Anthology album.
The interesting thing about the record is the fact that they included a self-composed number. The home-made disc label credits the composers as ‘McCartney, Harrison’. In reality, it was all Paul, trying to do an Elvis-type ballad, but George got a credit for helping with the arrangement. John is the lead vocalist on both songs with Paul and George backing up on harmonies.
The lyrics are fairly unmemorable: ‘In spite of all the danger / In spite of all that may be / I’ll do anything for you / Anything you want me to / If you’ll be true to me.’
I have always been intrigued by the precise meaning. If it is just a boy–girl love song, as it appears, then why would th
ere be any danger? It’s almost as if an illicit affair was going on, perhaps with a married woman, but how could that be, for a teenage boy in 1958, when sex had not yet been invented?*
Paul might well have been subconsciously thinking of his first sexual experience, which he later told me about, and which I used in my 1968 biography: ‘I got it first at fifteen. She was older and bigger than me. She was supposed to be babysitting while her mother was out.’ So that could have been the danger.
In August 1960 they made their first of five trips to play in Hamburg, a stage in their life seen as vital for their development as performers, helping them to create their own distinctive sound. It is interesting to wonder whether that would have come about if Paul’s mother had lived? As a trained nurse and midwife, she was keen on her sons’ education and on their economic and social improvement. She might well have insisted that he stayed on at grammar school to complete his studies. John’s Aunt Mimi had less influence in his life after he became an art student, while George, who had already left school and started a fairly pointless apprenticeship, was encouraged by his mother in all his musical activities. Mary McCartney, however, might well have put her foot down. And Paul, being a dutiful son, might well have given in. Then what would have happened? Would John and George have gone to Hamburg without Paul, splitting the Lennon–McCartney partnership before it had even begun?
In Hamburg they got their second experience of a recording studio, but only as the backing group for a singer called Tony Sheridan. I have a copy of the contract they signed with Bert Kaempfert Produktion dated 1 July 1961. Clause 7 states that John is ‘authorized as the Group’s representative to receive the payments’. John was the leader, as he had started the group. Whereas Paul’s full name, James Paul McCartney, is given, John Winston Lennon is listed as John W. Lennon. Pete Best was their drummer at the time, before the change to Ringo.
German contract for the Beatles, 1961, as a backing group, giving their home addresses.
Biog notes, written by John, Paul and George, for their German recording company in 1961. John signs himself ‘Leader’.
Polydor, the recording company, asked each of the group to write out a little biography. In his, John lists his ambition as ‘to be rich’ and signs himself ‘John W. Lennon (Leader)’; he mentions in passing that he has ‘written a couple of songs with Paul’. The biography Paul prepared is more detailed and effusive. Under a separate headline, ‘Songs Written’, he states ‘with John (Lennon)–around 70 songs’.
This record was to find its way to Liverpool and NEMS record shop, run by Brian Epstein, which led to Brian meeting them and going on to become their manager. In a five-year contract between Brian and the Beatles, signed on 1 October 1962, John and Ringo sign in their own names but Paul and George, still being under twenty-one, also had to obtain the signatures of their fathers.
The band agree that Brian, as their manager, will receive 25 per cent of ‘all moneys in consideration of their services as Artists’. The list of these services, covering how and where they might be performing or working, is interesting. It includes ‘vaudeville and review’ and also ‘balls, dances and private parties’. There is no mention of the possibility of any income as composers. Did Brian not expect them to make much money writing their own stuff, seeing them only as performers? Or was there no point in mentioning income from songs when they had yet to become recording artists?
Contract with Brian Epstein’s company, NEMS, 1962, in which they are desirous of performing at vaudeville, balls, dances, phonographic recordings.
One of their earliest engagements, before Brian took over, was at a strip club in Liverpool. When the stripper came on, she handed down her sheet music for them to play her backing tune. Unable to read it, they played something they did know, which was ‘Ramrod’. So, if they had been able to read music, would they have gone a different route, becoming session musicians, perhaps not bothering to write their own songs? Of course not. Their view was that being properly trained would only hold them back. Not knowing the rules allowed them to break the rules.
Paul never seems to have composed with George, or even thought about it, yet while they were both at the Liverpool Institute, he would often go back to George’s house, where his mother Louise was always welcoming, and they would practise chords, learn new tunes and techniques. But neither remembered writing together.
George was young for his age, which was very young anyway, as everyone remarked upon at the time, observing him walking like a lapdog ten yards behind John. He looked up to Paul as the clever one, and John as the leader, and tended to fade into the background rather than push himself forward. At sixteen, he had left school and started work as an apprentice electrician in a local department store. He probably felt intellectually inferior to Paul, the sixth former, and John, the art college student. When it came to composing songs, he left that to John and Paul, concentrating on playing the guitar properly.
Right from the beginning, Paul and John hit it off as joint composers. There was clearly some chemistry there. They were competing while co-operating, supporting while criticizing, rivals yet fans, loving each other while bitching. It was in the act of making music that they were at their closest.
Paul, George and John, recording in Abbey Road Studios, July 1963.
Partnerships were the norm when it came to composing popular songs, usually with one person responsible for the lyrics while the other did the music–for example Gilbert penned the words and Sullivan the music; Elton John’s songs had words written by Bernie Taupin; Mick Jagger did most of the words while Keith Richards composed the music. There have of course been notable exceptions, such as Noël Coward and Cole Porter, who did it all. (Cole Porter used to irritate Rodgers and Hammerstein by saying ‘How can it take two men to write one song?’)
Aside from the fact that they both wrote words and music, the other unusual aspect of Lennon and McCartney’s partnership was that they were performers as well as composers. Most composers, joint or otherwise, take a back seat, handing over their babies for others to bring into public life. Elvis never wrote his own songs, nor did Frank Sinatra. Dylan is an exception, writing words and music as well as performing, and his example inspired Paul and John.
There was one interesting and rather mysterious break in their joint song writing, which had been so productive from almost the first time they met, turning out, supposedly, 100 original new songs. During their early spells in Hamburg–covering roughly a year, 1960–61, they don’t appear to have written much, if anything. They were together all the time, not having to rely on finding an empty house in order to sit and work on a new song, as they had done in their early years at home in Liverpool, so in theory they should have produced more.
They were of course busy performing, almost nonstop, taking pills to keep awake, so didn’t have much spare time. But the more likely explanation is that when they first went to Hamburg, John was more involved with his art college friend Stu Sutcliffe, whom he had talked into joining the Beatles. Paul felt a bit a jealous, rather excluded, and for a while his relationship with John was not quite as intense. In July 1961, Stu, now engaged to Astrid Kirchherr, stayed on in Hamburg and left the group. He died tragically after a brain hemorrhage in April 1962.
By then, John and Paul had started writing songs together again, especially when there seemed to be a possibility, thanks to Brian Epstein’s hard work, that Decca or someone else might really offer them a recording contract.
There has always been a prejudice in the recording industry against performers getting above themselves, imagining they are creative artistes. Audiences can be unreceptive too; when an artist they know and love announces he or she is going to sing a song they have just written, the reaction from the fans is liable to be a moan of ‘Spare us’.
The other bias in Britain was that home-grown songs were, well, home-grown, and therefore inferior to the American variety, hence our native composers had to copy American music, producing pastiche
country and western or phoney blues songs, and the singers had to adopt a mid-Atlantic accent. British pop music, such as it was in the fifties and early sixties, was also London-centred, with a prejudice against provincial towns and cities, especially Northern ones like Liverpool–the assumption being that nothing noteworthy had ever come from there.
The Beatles had to break all these barriers down–and it took time.
So it’s all the more surprising that, when at long last they did get a break–the chance of a recording contract, in London–they dared presume or at least hope to be allowed to perform one of their home-grown original numbers…
Brian Epstein’s instructions for some of their exciting engagements, June 1962,–for which suits and ties were essential.
The Beatles, January 1963, make a personal appearance at NEMS musical store in Liverpool, signing copies of their new single ‘Please Please Me’.
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LOVE ME DO
Early singles and the first LP, Please Please Me
October 1962–August 1963
I have been unable to find a handwritten version of the words to ‘Love Me Do’–not a good start to this venture. Paul originally jotted down the words in a school notebook. They had been singing it together for at least four years, from Liverpool to Hamburg and back, and the words are simple and repetitious. It’s hard to forget them, even after a few drinks or some funny pills, so no need to write out any copies.
Considering the simplicity of the song, the recording history of ‘Love Me Do’ is complicated. It was one of thirty-three numbers that Brian Epstein typed out and offered to George Martin for their EMI audition on 6 June 1962.
The Beatles Lyrics Page 3