50 Years Ago Today…

It was 50 years ago today (February 11th, 1963), that the Beatles
recorded their first album, Please Please Me, in just under 10 hours. The
album also featured both sides of their first two singles — “Love Me Do”/”P.S.
I Love You,” and “Please Please Me”/”Ask Me Why,” which had been recorded the
previous autumn. The session for the album began at 10 a.m. at London’s Abbey
Road’s Studio Two — the main studio the group would use for the next eight
years — with 10 takes of the John Lennon-Paul McCartney original,
“There’s A Place.”

Over the course of the day the group basically performed their stage show as the tapes rolled, recording future Beatles classics like “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Do You Want To Know A Secret,” and “Twist And Shout.” The group’s recording engineer Richard Langham recalled the session in Mark Lewisohn‘s The Beatles’ Recording Sessions book. He remembered that when producer George Martin and the other engineers announced that they were taking a lunch break, the Beatles chose to stay and rehearse, revealing that, “When we came back they’d been playing right through. We couldn’t believe it. We had never seen a group work through their lunch break before.”