The Beatles (17 page)

Although it largely consists of a single line repeated like a musical mantra, ‘Christmas Time (Is Here Again)’ is illustrative of their fascination with children’s songs and rhymes which began with ‘Yellow Submarine’ in 1966. This in part reflected nostalgia for the Liverpool of the 1940s but was also part of the psychedelic tendency to regress to simpler states of mind where it wasn’t out of place for an adult to wear ripped jeans, blow bubbles and think buttercups were ‘far out’.

IN SPITE OF ALL THE DANGER

A rough recording transferred from a slightly worn 78 rpm shellac disc cut in the spring or summer of 1958, this has historical value in that it is the earliest taping of the soon-to-be Beatles as well as being the group’s first songwriting effort to make it into the archives.

It was recorded on a £400 portable tape recorder at a small studio housed in the terraced home of a 63-year-old electrical goods shop owner in the Kensington district of Liverpool. The Quarry Men, which then consisted of John, Paul, George, pianist John Duff Lowe and drummer Colin Hanton, paid 17 shillings and six pence (87p) to have two songs.cut.

The first song they chose was ‘That’ll Be The Day’, a September 1957 hit in Britain for the Crickets (with Buddy Holly), and the second was the McCartney-Harrison number ‘In Spite Of All The Danger’.

“It says on the label that it was me and George but I think it was written by me and George played the guitar solo,” said Paul in 1995. “It was my song. It was very similar to an Elvis song.”

It was in fact very similar to a particular Elvis song – ‘ Trying To Get To You’ – which was written by Rose Marie McCoy and Margie Singleton and recorded by Elvis on July 11 1955. It was the only Sun recording by Elvis ever to use a piano and was released as a single in September 1956.

John Duff Lowe remembers ‘In Spite Of All The Danger’ as being the only original song the Quarry Men played at the time.

“I can well remember even at the rehearsal at his house in Forthlin Road Paul was quite specific about how he wanted it played and what he wanted the piano to do,” he says. “There was no
question of improvising. We were told what we had to play. There was a lot of arranging going on, even back then.”

It was recorded on a single microphone and Lowe thinks that it must have gone straight to disc because he can’t recall waiting around for it to be transferred from tape and there are mistakes in John’s vocal which would otherwise have been corrected.

The disc was then passed on from member to member and eventually came down to Lowe who kept it in a sock drawer until 1981 when a colleague suggested to him that it might have some commercial value. He had it valued by Sotheby’s which led to the discovery of the disc being reported by
Sunday Times
columnist Stephen Pile in July 1981.

“Before mid-day on that Sunday Paul McCartney had called my mum in Liverpool,” says Lowe. “I eventually spoke to him on the ‘phone and we had long conversations over the next few days because he wanted to buy it from me.

“I was living in Worcester at the time and he sent his solicitor and his business manager up. I deposited the disc in a small brief case at the local Barclay’s Bank and we met up in a small room the bank kindly let me use. The deal was done, I handed the record over and we all went home.”

Although Paul didn’t have a specific project in mind at the time, part of the deal was that Lowe had to assign over all rights to the track and promise not to perform the song for the next fifteen years. “That took us up to August 1996,” says Lowe. “Isn’t it strange that two months later the final album in the
Anthology
set came out?”

YOU’LL BE MINE

Recorded in the summer of 1960 on a borrowed tape machine at Paul’s family home at Forthlin Road this is the first recording of a Lennon and McCartney song, although that’s the extent of its interest. It sounds like nothing more than a couple of minutes of musical hilarity put together by teenagers in awe of the sound of their own voices.

Without a drummer but with the addition of fourth guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe, the group were rehearsing for their upcoming stint in Hamburg and decided on an Inkspots parody with John delivering a melodramatic spoken section that owed a lot to his fascination with the Goons. Appropriately, the whole tracks concludes with a wild squeal of laughter. You can almost imagine them wetting themselves as they played it back again and again.

CAYENNE

Paul has said that the instrumental ‘Cayenne’, or ‘Cayenne Pepper’ as it was originally titled, was written before he met John, probably at the age of 14 when he got his first £15 guitar. Another instrumental he wrote around the same time, ‘Cat’s Walk’, was recorded by the Chris Barber Band in 1967 as ‘Cat Call’.

When Paul committed ‘Cayenne’ to tape in the summer of 1960 rock’n’roll instrumentals were a regular chart phenomenon. Since January there had been hit singles by Johnny and the Hurricanes, the Ventures, Duane Eddy, Bert Weedon, Sandy Nelson, Jerry Lordan, the John Barry Seven and the Shadows.

“It’s not brilliant,” Paul said recently of ‘Cayenne’, “But when you listen to it you can hear a lot of stuff I’m going to write. So, it’s interesting from that point of view.”

CRY FOR A SHADOW

When this track was recorded in June 1961, Cliff Richard and The Shadows were Britain’s premier rock and roll act. Since his first hit with ‘Move It’ in October 1958 Cliff had been in the Top Ten ten times and the Shadows were now making their own instrumental hits.

Although the Beatles found Cliff a bit too tame for their liking, they were early admirers of the Shadows. Paul learned the opening chords of ‘Move It’ from watching lead guitarist Hank Marvin’s finger movements on the
Oh Boy!
TV show and, when Cliff first played the Liverpool Empire on October 12, 1958, Paul was in the audience.

‘Cry For A Shadow’, an instrumental intended to sound like mock Shadows, was credited to Harrison/Lennon. It was the Beatles’ first composition to make it onto record when it appeared on Tony Sheridan’s 1962 German album
My Bonnie
where the ‘backing group’ were listed as the Beat Brothers.

The composition came about by accident. Rory Storm was in Germany and had asked George to play him a recent Shadows hit – ‘Apache’ or ‘Frightened City’ – and George played something new, either because he couldn’t remember the Shadows’ tunes or as a joke on Storm. At first he called it ‘Beatle Bop’ but then, out of homage to his original inspiration, he called it ‘Cry For A Shadow’.

“It doesn’t sound like ‘Frightened City’ or ‘Apache’,” says Shadows guitarist Bruce Welch. “What it has in common with the Shadows is that it has the same instrumentation that we used but melodically it’s nowhere near either of them.

“What I had heard was that it was done as a piss-take because at that time we had a stranglehold on the British group scene and we’d never been to Germany as almost every other group did.” The song
was recorded in Germany when the orchestra leader and record company producer Bert Kaempfert hired the Beatles for 300 Deutschmarks to back Sheridan on a Polydor record. Norwich-born Sheridan, a veteran of London’s 2 I’s coffee bar, had spent a lot of time in Germany and Kaempfert wanted him to do rocked-up versions of such standards as ‘My Bonnie’ and ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’. The Beatles were allowed their own spot on ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ and ‘Cry For A Shadow’.

Brian Epstein, who was responsible for getting the Beatles out of leather jackets and into tailored suits, encouraged them to emulate the Shadows in their attire and on-stage courtesies. The two groups first met in 1963 at a party in London and in June of that year Hank, Bruce and Brian Locking came to Paul’s 21st in Liverpool.

LIKE DREAMERS DO

Merseybeat consisted largely of covers of recent American hits and selections from Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis. The Beatles stood out initially by discovering unknown acts and obscure B-sides but even these were soon copied and became standard fare on Merseyside.

This was what pushed them into serious songwriting. It was the only guarantee of uniqueness. If you had your own material then you were set apart from the copyists.

It was this situation that prompted them into serious writing. Their goal was to come up with material that not only went down well with their audiences but which remained unique to their act. Paul has said that ‘Like Dreamers Do’ was one of the first of his own compositions that he tried at the Cavern. This implies that he wrote it for the Cavern audience but the Quarry Men were performing it as far back as 1958. What he probably meant was that it was one of the first songs from his back catalogue that he felt confident enough to slip into the Beatles regular set.

The early arrangement of the song, he thought was weak although “certain of the kids” at the Cavern liked it. When the Beatles came to audition for Decca on January 1st, 1962 it was one of three Lennon-McCartney songs that they included in a 15-song set (the others were ‘Hello Little Girl’ and ‘Love Of The Loved’).

By the time of their EMI audition nine months later, none of these songs were offered, all of them having been replaced by better material. Shortly afterwards they were offered to other artists, ‘Like Dreamers Do’ to The Applejacks, a Birmingham six-piece group with a female bassist, who reached number 20 with it in July 1964.

HELLO LITTLE GIRL

John frequently referred to ‘Hello Little Girl’ as his earliest composition. Written in 1958, it became the first of his songs to be performed by the Quarry Men.

He credited its origin to the Cole Porter song ‘It’s De-Lovely’, with its chorus of ‘It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely’, which was first sung by Bob Hope in the 1936 stage musical
Red, Hot and Blue
and was recorded in Britain by Carroll Gibbons and The Savoy Hotel Orpheans in 1938.

“That song always fascinated me for some reason or another,” John said. “It was possibly connected to my mother. She used to sing that one. It’s all very Freudian. So I made ‘Hello Little Girl’ out of it. It was supposed to be a Buddy Holly-style song.”

There is no similarity between the two songs other than the device of repeating the title as a chorus. It may have been more the
playful spirit of the song and, as with ‘ Please Please me’, the association with his mother’s musical interests. The imprint of Buddy Holly is more easily detectable. In its earliest incarnation the middle eight was apparently swiped wholesale from ‘Maybe Baby’.

Just as Paul’s early songs always bore the hallmark of optimism, John’s bore the hallmark of pessimism. Paul assumed acceptance and love where John braced himself for rejection. In ‘Hello Little Girl’ he attempts to attract a girl’s attention but she remains unaware of him. He sends her flowers but she is unmoved. He ends up lonely about to ‘lose my mind’.

Recorded for the Decca audition in January 1962 ‘Hello Little Girl’ was already off their set list by the time they signed for EMI later in the year. “It was then offered to Gerry and the Pacemakers,” remembers Tony Bramwell. “It was considered as the follow up to ‘How Do You Do It?’. They recorded a demo of it (included on
Gerry and the Pacemakers; The Best of the EMI Years
, 1992) but by that time Mitch Murray had come up with ‘I Like It’.”

The song was then offered to The Fourmost, another Liverpool group managed by Brian Epstein. After a Sunday concert in Blackpool where the two groups had appeared, John invited The Fourmost to his house to see the lyrics. The following morning they were sent a demo tape. “We had to record on the Wednesday and so we only had two days to record it,” said bass guitarist Billy Hatton. “As a matter of fact, when we were recording, we were just learning the song as we went along.”

The record was a hit after its release on August 23 and reached number 7 in the British charts. It was released in America on September 16.

YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO

A languid country-flavoured song written by George and recorded on June 3, 1964. Ringo had been taken ill that morning, on the verge of a tour, and so the studio time booked to record a fourteenth and final song for the
A Hard Day’s Night
album had to be used to rehearse substitute drummer Jimmy Nicol. As a result only three new demos were recorded that day – Paul’s ‘It’s For You’ (later given to Cilla Black), John’s ‘No Reply’ and this new song from George.

Being the youngest Beatle, George always had a hard time getting his ideas to be taken seriously. This was only the second song of his to be taped by the group (the first being ‘Don’t Bother Me’) but it was never developed and, due to misfiling, it was lost for the next three decades. If it had been worked on by the group, it would surely have been a contender for
Beatles For Sale.

Although it is undoubtedly a formula song with no deep revelation at the core it’s interesting to note that George was just twelve weeks into his courtship of Pattie Boyd. Could he have written a song at the time about wanting to be with his girl ‘every hour of the day’ without having her in mind?

IF YOU’VE GOT TROUBLE

John and Paul never gave Ringo their best songs but neither did they only give him their worst. However, ‘If You’ve Got Trouble’ must rate as the worst one they ever expected him to sing. Melodically, it’s uninspiring. Lyrically, it’s embarrassing. It’s hard to believe that the team that had just written ‘Ticket To Ride’ and ‘ You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ could come up with this. Recorded in one take, it sounds as though it was also composed in one take.

The theme of the song could be roughly summarised as ‘If you think you’ve got problems - you should see mine!’ The vitriol in the song sounds like John. Did it start out as a barbed attack on Cynthia, telling her to quit complaining about his abilities as a husband and a father and to be grateful for the luxuries afforded by the Beatles’ new stardom?

An interview that year in the
Saturday Evening Post
conducted by Al Aronowitz suggests such a context for the song; “Their friends say that she (Cynthia) was in awe of John when they first met and she still is; a feeling, in fact, which has grown as his stardom rockets him further into the entertainment heavens, troubling her with the occasional thought that she might be left behind. When the Beatles are on tour, she often is left behind. ‘Well, she certainly doesn’t seem to mind spending the money I’m making,” John says.”