Please Please Me is the debut studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. Produced by George Martin, it was released in the UK on EMI's Parlophone label on 22 March 1963. The album is 14 songs in length, and contains a mixture of cover s…
Please Please Me is the debut studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. Produced by George Martin, it was released in the UK on EMI's Parlophone label on 22 March 1963. The album is 14 songs in length, and contains a mixture of cover songs and original material written by the partnership of band members John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
The Beatles had signed with EMI in May 1962 and had been assigned to the Parlophone label run by Martin. They released their debut single "Love Me Do" in October, which surprised Martin and reached number 17 on what would become the official UK singles chart. Impressed with the band, Martin suggested they record a live album and helped arrange their next single, "Please Please Me", which topped multiple unofficial charts. Finding the Cavern Club, the band's home venue in their native Liverpool, unsuitable for recording, Martin changed the plan to a simple studio album. Other than the material already present in their singles, the Beatles recorded Please Please Me in one day at EMI Studios on 11 February 1963, with Martin adding overdubs to "Misery" and "Baby It's You" nine days later.
The album was well-received in Britain, where it remained in the Top 10 for over a year, a record for a debut album that stood for half a century. The presence of several songs written by band members Lennon–McCartney (credited as "McCartney–Lennon" at the time) was unusual and marked the emergence of a "self-contained rock band". On the other hand, the album was not released in the US, where the band sold poorly for most of 1963; after the stateside emergence of Beatlemania, Vee-Jay Records released a mild abridgment of the album as Introducing... The Beatles in early 1964, while EMI's American label Capitol Records divided the material from Please Please Me across multiple albums. Other countries also received different versions of the album, which continued until 1987, when the entirety of the Beatles catalogue was brought to CD and internationally standardised to the UK albums.
Please Please Me remains critically acclaimed; it was voted 39th on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" in 2012, and number 622 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums in 2000.
Tracklist:
Side one
1. I Saw Her Standing There 0:00
2. Misery 2:58
3. Anna (Go to Him) 4:47
4. Chains 7:43
5. Boys 10:09
6. Ask Me Why 12:34
7. Please Please Me 15:00
Side two
1. Love Me Do 17:02
2. P.S. I Love You 19:24
3. Baby It's You 21:28
4. Do You Want to Know a Secret 24:08
5. A Taste of Honey 26:06
6. There's a Place 28:09
7. Twist and Shout 30:00
+++ Description, Tracklist and Timecodes by Alexander4History +++
