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.
