![]() ![]() He’d achieved great success two years earlier capturing the wildly popular Beyond the Fringe satire revue (featuring a young Dudley Moore and Peter Cook) with a tape recorder directly under the stage of London’s Fortune Theater. Cheap and practically instantaneous to produce, the format had much to recommend itself. “I had been up to the Cavern and I’d seen what they could do – I knew their repertoire, knew what they were able to perform,” he recalled for the Beatles’ 1995 Anthology documentary. ![]() ![]() He initially considered a live recording at the band’s Liverpool home base. With a smash on his hands, Martin knew that the next logical step was getting a full-length LP into shops as rapidly as possible. Almost overnight, the single launched skyward. As the band lip-synced to its latest record, viewers were transfixed by the instantly hummable melody, cascading harmonies, relentless beat and – for early-Sixties Britain – ridiculously long hair. ![]() The winter of 1963 was one of the most brutal in England’s history, and the record-breaking cold forced many to spend their Saturday nights at home in front of the television, just in time to catch the band making one of its earliest national broadcast appearances on ITV’s pop-music program Thank Your Lucky Stars. Released on January 11th, the song received an unexpected boost from Mother Nature the following week. “Gentlemen,” he addressed his young moptopped charges, “I think you’ve made your first Number One.” The veteran producer had a finely tuned ear for hits, but it would be several months before the Beatles rode their second single to the top of the charts. The last notes of “Please Please Me” still hung in the stale air of EMI’s Studio Two on November 26th, 1962, when George Martin’s disembodied voice crackled over the talkback from the control room above. ![]()
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