Song Lyric Sunday: Always Rain In My Heart

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A photo of the Beatles – Ringo, Paul, George, and John – looking down over a stairwell railing

This week’s Song Lyric Sunday is a real invitation to take a trip down Memory Lane, as Jim is asking us to play a song that we remember from our childhood. Read all about it here in his post Childhood Music Hits. I could have gone for one of the kiddie songs that I knew back then, and even briefly considered Puff The Magic Dragon. Very briefly! But I’m going with something which was absolutely momentous, and which had a huge effect on my musical tastes as I was growing up – and forever since then, too.

This is my song for this week:

And not that you really need them – they aren’t that complicated – but here are the lyrics:

Last night I said these words to my girlI know you never even try, girlCome on (come on), come on (come on)Come on (come on), come on (come on) Please, please me, whoa yeah, like I please you
 
You don’t need me to show the way, loveWhy do I always have to say, loveCome on (come on), come on (come on)Come on (come on), come on (come on) Please, please me, whoa yeah, like I please you
 
I don’t want to sound complainingBut you know there’s always rain in my heart (in my heart)I do all the pleasing with youIt’s so hard to reason with youwhoa yeah, why do you make me blue?
 
Last night I said these words to my girlI know you never even try, girlCome on (come on), come on (come on)Come on (come on), come on (come on)Please, please me, whoa yeah, like I please you(Please me) whoa yeah, like I please you(Please me) whoa yeah, like I please you
 
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: John Winston Lennon / Paul James McCartney
Please Please Me lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
 
I have written about Please Please Me before, but as that was nearly eight years ago I don’t think a reprise can be seen as overplaying it. So why was this so important in my musical journey? Picture the time when this record came out. I was 9 and a few months old, and on Boxing Day evening 1962 I was out helping my Dad clear out some of the detritus from the family celebrations. He looked up at the sky and said “Do you know, we might have missed a White Christmas by a day or two – I think it’s going to snow.” He was right. It snowed into the next day and began the big freeze: apart from roads that had been cleared we didn’t see the ground again until early March, with regular additional snowfalls each time we thought it might be clearing up. My first thought was that we wouldn’t be able to get to school but, unfortunately for me, even in those distant times the system was sufficiently well geared that the roads were good enough for the bus service to be there by the end of the school holidays. But we had a lot of fun that winter with our sledge on the hills around our village! We suffered massive disruption: football matches were postponed just about everywhere, most other sports also took a battering, and the Saturday afternoon sports shows were scrabbling around to find something taking place indoors! But we still had radio and TV with other ways to entertain us.
 
Please Please Me was released as a single on 11 January 1963 and a week later I, along with probably most of the UK population, saw The Beatles perform it on the TV programme Thank Your Lucky Stars. I had been interested in pop music for a year or two, but the Beatles were an eye-opener. In those days our exposure to pop was on a much smaller scale than today. In the UK we only had 2 TV channels, which had very little in the way of pop music programmes, and the BBC’s national radio networks weren’t really geared up to younger audiences. The only commercial radio station available to us was Radio Luxembourg, which was so difficult to pick up that you had to be really dedicated to persevere with it – and when you finally did manage to tune in, it was like listening to music being broadcast from another galaxy, transmitted through a high-powered wind tunnel. But it was all we had, and we listened in our droves, until the pirate radio stations came along and changed everything..
 
The national UK TV channels – the BBC and ITV –  gave us the occasional pop artist as a guest on the variety shows which were popular at the time with our parents and other assorted oldies. Prior to the Beatles this would be the likes of Cliff Richard or John Leyton: it’s a surprise that I ever got interested in music, really, after an introduction like that! The radio stations were no better: only one  – the BBC Light Programme – played pop music, and even then it was usually cover versions by the in-house orchestra rather than proper records.
 
Please Please Me was the Beatles’ second single in the UK, after Love Me Do reached #17 in autumn 1962. It peaked at #2, and led the way for a string of UK and worldwide number ones starting with From Me To You, its follow up. It wasn’t a hit in the US at first, but was re-released in January 1964 and made #3 there, selling a million copies in the process. Looking back on it, a song which was basically saying “Here, love, grab hold of that” might have been expected to be banned, but perhaps the BBC were too innocent to realise that – as was this little 9 year old boy.
 
It became the title track of their debut album, which was released in the UK in March 1963. The whole album was recorded in one marathon day-long session, and this little video tells you about that:
 
 
The album made #1 here but wasn’t released in the US – their record company began a process of buggering around with UK artists that continued through most of the Sixties, and if you look at Wikipedia they give a much changed list of album releases for the band between the two countries. I’ve never understood that: it smacks of arrogance on the part of the record companies, ignoring the wishes of those creating the music. Sales were still good, though!
 
Whenever I hear this I’m transported back to those magical days of my childhood, to the times when my little sister and I used to play and sing along, using our toy tennis rackets as guitars, and were convinced that we sounded far better than the BBC’s anonymous concert orchestra singers. With hindsight I doubt that we did, but we were living a dream, and that is one of the wonderful things about music, and why I have chosen this song this week. I hope it brings back memories for you, too.
 

58 thoughts on “Song Lyric Sunday: Always Rain In My Heart”

  1. Pingback: My September | Take It Easy

  4. HI Clive, a lovely post. I didn’t mean to be rude about The Beatles in my previous comment, I just don’t enjoy their music as much as I like ’80s and ’90s music – the music of my teens. I love Puff the Magic Dragan and I would add Peter and the Wolf as a favourite childhood musical story.

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  6. Goods grief, the tail end of the ‘Never had it so good’ times! They were dull bleak black and white days, at least till the Beatles came along. The early 60’s- Elvis in a nice tidy dutiful uniform, sweat-soaked darkly dangerous hair castra- shorn into a crew cut, Chuck Berry getting railroaded, Jerry Lee self-sabotaging … Frank Ifield and Val Doonican being seen as cutting edge for the kids by the Beeb!? Music and life needed a shake-up and the Beatles kicked us right up into the swinging sixties. Thank God.

    I guess you had to be there to understand just what their music brought to our rule-bound short-back-and-sides striped-suit white shirt Old School tie- the little woman looking after the kiddies and doing her domestic duties dull as dishwater life. NOT good times. I have a lot more sympathy for our parents now. Then I considered them a miserly and unadventurous lot. But boy, it was a pretty poor life they were lumbered with.

    Sorry, this took off into a personal historical reminiscence, oops. Ah well, at least I’ve vented!

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      • I believe that was the year the Thames froze.
        I remember snowball fights though I always got picked on so stayed indoors with my paints and colouring books.
        We were in the council house which only had a coal fire in the lounge for heating and I remember Mum putting hot water bottles in the beds, and extra blankets to keep us warm. We also had hot ovaltine before going to bed!

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      • It did, I’ve seen that from reports of the time.

        We had a coal fire in the lounge and a coal fired Raeburn in the kitchen, but upstairs was very cold. We had the hot water bottle and Ovaltine routine too 😊

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  12. I am so happy you picked this one. Definitely a defining moment for many of us when this was released. ☺️

    Clive I agree with what you said about how difficult it was to hear the kind of mjusic we were interested in at that time. Thankfully in the early 60s Pirate Radio starting popping up with Radio Caroline, Radio London and of course there was Radio Luxembourg.

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  13. I grew up a little behind you, 4 yrs old in 62′, I remember we had three tv channels in the states that shut down at midnight. The radio [AM] channels only had one that would play any pop. My oldest sister would run out and by anything the Beatles put out and turned me onto many great artists. Nice trip back John. And did they ever close schools back then, not that I remember.

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  14. Thanks for a fantastic post, Clive! I was hoping someone would go with a song by the Beatles as they were at the center of our very young lives. Of course, I thought about featuring the Beatles; after all, I saw them live at Shea Stadium in ’65 and am a self-professed Beatlemaniac, as you know. The song I went with had special memories of my Dad and I couldn’t pass that one up. 😊

    I’ve never seen the Mini-Docu vid before; what a terrific 3 minutes and 52 seconds! Excellent way to start my day! 😎

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    • Thank you, Nancy. I’d half expected that we might have duplicated today but can see why you went for the one you did, with all of its memories.

      I hadn’t seen that little documentary before, either, but it popped up in the YouTube search and I thought it worth sharing. 14 tracks in 13 hours was a far cry from the time spent on some of their later recordings!

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      • They certainly were, Clive the snow drifted over Harlow common it was great fun and yes spare clothes and our coats on the radiators teachers just got on with as well..my father still went to work as did everyone else 🙂 xx

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      • I’d imagine the common was very popular then! We had Whitfield Hill, and the sloping grasslands beside it. That was the same for us too – I don’t think Mum had started working again by then but Dad went in every day. His one concession was to get the bus rather than cycling like he usually did 🤣 xx

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