The Beatles "Please Please Me" Parlophone PMC 1202 XEX 421/2 1N/1N Mono 1963

	£		15
	$		20

The Beatles ? "Please Please Me"  Parlophone ?PMC 1202 

Mono Vinyl, LP, repress,issued in 1963.

The vinyl has a couple of surface marks but these don't get in the way of the music. The LP played through beautifully on my elderly stereo - no hop, stick or jump. The LP is housed in its original Emitex inner, which is in good shape - no rips or writing. A previous owner has put a sticker with their name on the label on Side One. For good measure, they have written their name on the back of the Ernest J Day sleeve, although this is the only major blemish it has, again, no rips or writing. The spine is intact and legible.

Matrix / Runout Side 1 : XEX 421 - 1N

Matrix / Runout Side 2 : XEX 422 - 1N 

"Please Please Me" is the Beatles' debut studio album. Parlophone rush-released the album on 22 March 1963 in the United Kingdom to capitalise on the success of the band's singles "Please Please Me" (number 1 on most charts, although only number 2 on Record Retailer, later the UK Singles Chart) and "Love Me Do" (number 17). The album topped Record Retailer's LP chart for 30 weeks, an unprecedented achievement for a pop album at that time.

Of the album's 14 songs, eight were written by Lennon–McCartney (originally credited "McCartney–Lennon"). Rolling Stone magazine later cited these original compositions as early evidence of the Beatles' "[invention of] the idea of the self-contained rock band, writing their own hits and playing their own instruments". In 2012, Please Please Me was voted 39th on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Nationwide interest in the Beatles had been piqued with the success of their second UK single and Parlophone Records, hoping to take advantage of this, promptly decided to follow it up with an album. Consequently, their record producer, George Martin, urgently needed ten more tracks if he were to include the four sides ("Love Me Do" / "P.S. I Love You" and "Please Please Me" / "Ask Me Why") of the group's first two singles: “I asked them what they had which we could record quickly, and the answer was their stage act” Martin said (the norm for British 12" vinyl pop albums in 1963 was to have seven songs on each side whereas American albums usually had five or six songs per side). Having established that the Cavern Club was unsuitable for live recording purposes they were booked into EMI Studios in Abbey Road and recorded live there instead. Martin said, "It was a straightforward performance of their stage repertoire – a broadcast, more or less." Initially, a morning and afternoon session only were booked; the evening session was added later.

Therefore, at 10:00 am on Monday, 11 February 1963, the Beatles began working their way through their live set song by song, the number of takes varying on each, and finished at 10:45 pm – less than 13 hours later – capturing in essence an authentic representation of the band's Cavern Club-era sound. The day ended with a cover of "Twist and Shout", which had to be recorded last because John Lennon had a particularly bad cold and Martin feared the throat-shredding vocal would ruin Lennon's voice for the day. This performance, caught on the first take, prompted Martin to say: "I don't know how they do it. We've been recording all day but the longer we go on the better they get." Mark Lewisohn later wrote: "There can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music" Paul McCartney double-tracked his vocal on "A Taste of Honey" and Lennon added harmonica onto "There's a Place" during these sessions. Martin overdubbed piano on "Misery" and celesta on "Baby It's You" on 20 February, during which the Beatles were not present.

The song "Hold Me Tight" was recorded during the sessions, but was "surplus to requirements" and not included on the album. "Hold Me Tight" was recorded again on 12 September 1963 for With the Beatles.

The whole day's session cost around £400 (equivalent to £7,700 in 2016). Martin said: "There wasn't a lot of money at Parlophone. I was working to an annual budget of £55,000." This budget had to cover all of the artists on Martin's roster. Individually, under a contract with the Musicians' Union, each Beatle collected a £7 10s (£7.50 or £144 in 2016) session fee for each three-hour session (10:00 am – 1:00 pm / 2:30 pm – 5:30 pm / 7:30 pm – 10:30 pm).

"Please Please Me" was released as a mono LP album on the Parlophone label in the UK on 22 March 1963, and has remained on UK catalogue continuously since 1963. The stereo version was released on 26 April, over a month after the mono version.

George Martin was an honorary fellow of the Zoological Society of London, which owns the London Zoo. Martin thought that it might be good publicity for the zoo to have the Beatles pose outside the insect house for the cover photography of the album. However, the society turned down Martin's offer, and instead, Angus McBean was asked to take the distinctive colour photograph of the group looking down over the stairwell inside EMI's London headquarters in Manchester Square. Martin was to write later: "We rang up the legendary theatre photographer Angus McBean, and bingo, he came round and did it there and then. It was done in an almighty rush, like the music. Thereafter, though, the Beatles' own creativity came bursting to the fore." In 1969, the Beatles asked McBean to recreate this shot. Although the 1969 photograph was originally intended for the then-planned "Get Back" album, it was not used when that project saw eventual release in 1970 as "Let It Be". Instead, the 1969 photograph, along with an unused photograph from the 1963 photo shoot, was used in 1973 for the Beatles' retrospective albums "1962–1966" and "1967–1970". Another unused photograph from the 1963 photo shoot was used for "The Beatles (No. 1)" (EP released 1 November 1963). As consistent with all early 1960s albums made in the UK, the rear of the album sleeve has sleeve notes. The Beatles' press officer Tony Barrow wrote extensive sleeve notes, which included a brief mention of their early 1960s rivals The Shadows.

"Please Please Me" hit the top of the UK album charts in May 1963 and remained there for 30 weeks before being replaced by "With the Beatles". This was surprising because the UK album charts at the time tended to be dominated by film soundtracks and easy listening vocalists.

In a 1987 review coinciding with the album's CD reissue, Rolling Stone magazine's Steve Pond recommended "Please Please Me" "for the Beatles' unfettered joy at making music". In 2012, "Please Please Me" was voted 39th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". It was ranked first among the Beatles' early albums, and sixth of all of the Beatles' albums, with "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", "Revolver", "Rubber Soul", "The Beatles" (also known as "The White Album") and "Abbey Road" ranked higher.

Rolling Stone also placed two songs from the album on its list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time": "I Saw Her Standing There" at number 140, and "Please Please Me" at number 186. According to Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic, "Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh", the covers are "impressive" and the originals "astonishing".