“With The Beatles” is the first LP I can remember hearing, round at family houses in Liverpool in the 1960s. (Our own home did not possess a record player.) Nostalgically at least, it’s perhaps my all-time favourite. This article was written for a Mojo Beatles special in Autumn 2002, and reprinted in a 2004 Mojo book, The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook The World (Dorling Kindersley).

November the 22nd, 1963, was the 9/11 of its era - – a day of abrupt, shocking catastrophe. Driving through Dallas in his open-topped limousine, President John F. Kennedy was shot dead. On that same day, in London, Parlophone Records released the first great album of the decade. Had it been a record by anyone else the bleak coincidence of its release date would be an irrelevance. But this LP was “With The Beatles” and it stands, in the history of its times, as an event of no mean significance. Where the killing of Kennedy suggested the crushing of youthful hope and the onset of a morbidly pessimistic age, the arrival of The Beatles in the global imagination would herald the very opposite.
    The magic began at Abbey Road in mid-July. Having two self-written Number 1s to their credit, the group kicked off their new album sessions with a growing confidence in themselves as composers. (Soon there would be third triumph, She Loves You: its “yeah yeah yeah” refrain would seize the nation’s brain that Summer and must have pushed morale inside the EMI studios to astronomic levels.) This time around the LP’s original tracks would outnumber the cover versions. The only snag was that their own songs weren’t written yet, To get the juices flowing therefore they used the initial days to record other people’s numbers, most of which had already been road-tested at the Cavern and elsewhere.
    Foremost among the covers must be John Lennon’s Motown trilogy, comprising Smokey Robinson’s You Really Got A Hold On Me, The Marvelletes’ Please Mr Postman and Barrett Strong’s Money. In common with most of their Liverpool peers, The Beatles were never really blues scholars like their London counterparts in The Rolling Stones and Yardbirds. But they were among the first young Britons to recognise the genius of Berry Gordy’s label in Detroit. And of all the Motown talent, Smokey Robinson, of the Miracles, was their songwriting idol.
    It’s one of the cliches of rock’n’roll history that white performers stripped the sex and danger out of black material and cleaned up in the process. That might be true of Pat Boone covering Little Richard, or Bill Haley doing Big Joe Turner, but it was not the case with Elvis and nor was it true of Lennon’s Motown covers. For better or worse, he turns the yearning submission of Smokey’s song, You Really Got A Hold On Me, into a smouldering declaration of sexual impatience. Please Mr Postman becomes almost violent, the passive chant of its girl-group original replaced by John’s aggressively demanding bark. And Money, positioned at the album’s close to supply the same blazing finale that Twist And Shout had given the first LP, is absolutely hard core. Written by Gordy himself, the song was intimidating enough when sung by Barrett Strong, who invested his request (“I need money, that’s what I want”) with macho menace; in John Lennon’s hands it becomes one long howl of desperation. A soul connoisseur could argue that The Beatles’ Motown covers lost the sophistication of the originals, but they are not wanting in passion.
    Paul McCartney had yet to emerge as a composer of plangent, romantic ballads (a reputation he would soon establish with And I Love Her on “A Hard Day’s Night”). Here however was another of the songs he evidently honed that craft upon, namely Till There Was You. The number had been around for a few years, first aired in Broadway show “The Music Man”, but it was Peggy Lee’s single of 1961 that brought the song to Paul’s attention. His own reading takes a step back from Lee’s huskily intimate delivery, and there may already have been a sense that such a track was slightly square in this new decade. But it remained for a while a staple of their live act, offering a dash of that “versatility” required of any act with claims to being all-round entertainers.
    George Harrison is well represented on “With The Beatles”. He chalks up his first songwriting credit with the slight but attractive Don’t Bother Me; he takes the lead vocal on Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven (itself a lead guitarist’s showcase) and effects a gender switch for yet another girl-group number, The Donays’ Devil In His Heart. And Ringo, in the tradition initiated by Boys on “Please Please Me” is given his own romp in the spotlight on I Wanna Be Your Man: Paul and John had begun to write the song with their drummer’s limited range in mind, but they finished it sitting in the corner before a Stones session, in a comradely response to an appeal for material. (The juddering Bo Diddley rhythm has always seemed more right for Jagger and co, and their recording would soon become their first Top 20 hit.)
    There was, at any rate, one new Lennon and McCartney number already available for the second LP. Hold Me Tight had been attempted in the course of that heroic one-day session for the first album, just a few months earlier. Somehow the song had failed to gel that time, and it was resurrected now for a fresh effort. Yet there is still an impression of unfinished business in Hold Me Tight: it’s an efficient little rocker but there’s a general unsteadiness of pitch in Paul’s vocal: the glitches in his approach to the two middle eights, in particular, are probably the biggest boobs in The Beatles’ official catalogue. The leisurely days of endless re-takes were not yet at hand: the pressures of time and money meant the old dictum “close enough for rock’n’roll” ruled even a figure as fastidious as George Martin.
    A few of the other new compositions are hardly in the front rank of Lennon and McCartney’s work – Little Child is nearly anonymous, saved by John’s harmonica, while All I’ve Got To Do is more evidence of his apprenticeship at the schools of Smokey Robinson and Arthur Alexander. Few would nowadays nominate Not A Second Time as one of The Beatles’ greatest, but it claims the strange distinction of having prompted The Times’ classical music critic to hail that celebrated “Aeolian cadence” and make cautious comparisons to Mahler. Valid or not, the comments served to open a generation of well-stocked minds to the possibility of real art arising in pop disguise.
    The outstanding additions to John and Paul’s portfolios, without a doubt, are It Won’t Be Long and All My Loving. Each abounds with the respective partners’ signature characteristics: urgency and tension in Lennon’s song (“You’re coming home! You’re coming home!”), optimism and consolation in Paul’s (“I’ll pretend that I’m kissing the lips I am missing”). It’s no accident that both take for their subject a theme of lovers’ separation: they were developing their melodic and harmonic powers by the day, but their lyrical ideas were still off-the-peg. Just as they understood the potency of personal pronouns and stock scenarios (Love Me Do, From Me To You, She Loves You), so they were aware of radio listeners’ devotion to the “missing you, darling” songs of the BBC’s “Two-Way Family Favourites”, forever stocked by tremulous requests from lovelorn soldiers in Cyprus, sorrowing sailors in Valparaiso and homesick emigrants in Australia.
    In between the sessions’ end and the LP’s release, the British newspapers invented a new word, Beatlemania, while the Queen and courtiers were invited to rattle their jewellery” at the Royal Command Performance. Within a week of “With The Beatles”’ appearance, just in time for a million missives to Santa Claus, the boys unleashed I Want To Hold Your Hand and the surrender of America was imminent. But for now, amid the gathering madness, all that mattered in British homes was getting a copy of this record. It looked so well on the low-slung stereogram that had just replaced the wind-up gramophone in the corner. And the cool, strangely austere artwork already hinted at something deeper and darker to emerge from these funny young men. In that early satellite age, their four faces hung like brand new planets, half-lit in the inky blackness of space, full of a wonderful promise.