“Hope with its collar up on a chilly morning.” – 60 Years of Love Me Do
Perhaps the most surprising thing about stepping into Paul McCartney’s childhood home in Forthlin Rd isn’t what happens. It’s what doesn’t happen. Your internal jukebox isn’t immediately activated. Beatles hits don’t suddenly start playing in your head. This small corner of post-war suburban life in Liverpool couldn’t be further removed from the deafening teen screams triggered by songs that were written here. What happens instead is something a little more sobering, profound even. You come expecting to see the scene of pop’s Big Bang. But the story of The Beatles is the story of thousands of small serendipities, all of which needed to happen before the release of their very first single, Love Me Do – released 60 years ago this week.
Indeed, one of those serendipities concerns the very fact that it was Love Me Do which introduced The Beatles to the wider world. Between its creation, in the dining room of Forthlin Road, and its release, four years had elapsed. Recalling its creation in last year’s “songography” The Lyrics, Paul recalled writing the song around John’s “little harmonica riff.” Once the words were finished, the pair would typically head the lyric sheet, “Another Lennon and McCartney composition.” They had only written a handful of songs at this point, but the conceit clearly flagged up their desire to establish themselves not just as performers but as a proven song machine.
By the time they came to record Love Me Do, they had plenty of other songs, although none, it seems that sufficiently persuaded their new label boss and producer George Martin that any of them would pass muster as an A-side. To Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison and the newly-installed Ringo Starr, the prospect of releasing Martin’s preferred choice Mitch Murray’s How Do You Do? (later a hit for Gerry & The Pacemakers) was an indignity they were going to have to swallow. So how did the slight, simple juvenilia of Love Me Do see off all competition to persuade Martin, at the eleventh hour, that this would be the song to introduce his new signings to the world?
We can never be sure, but a number of factors are worth bearing in mind – and really, they all feed into the fact that, in spite of Paul’s comments that there’s “nothing to it; it’s a will’o’-the-wisp song”, Love Me Do isn’t as slight, simple or juvenile as it first seems. It might even be the most misunderstood song in The Beatles’ canon. Love Me Do is not just a “grower”. It might be the mother of all growers. During those sessions at EMI’s Abbey Road studios to determine a debut single, it took The Beatles fifteen attempts to record a version of the song with which they were happy – and it might just be that if they’d done it in two, then no-one would have noticed what an insidiously mesmerising song it was. But what was it about this simple three-chord entreaty to indicate true greatness?
In order to accurately answer that question, it’s useful to look at what Love Me Do isn’t as much as what it is. What almost certainly started life as one of a flurry of Buddy Holly-style rockers written by John and Paul four years previously had slowed into something whose inspirations are altogether harder to pin down. Also detectable in John and Paul’s harmonies on Love Me Do is the influence of The Everly Brothers, who hadn’t exactly invented sibling harmonies but were, whose songs and (just as importantly) their aspirational appeal were’t lost on John and Paul (“…just two guys, two good-looking guys? So we idolised them. We wanted to be like them”)
While Love Me Do’s charms are homespun – as easy to imagine chiming from the McCartneys’ dining room as it is coming out of a transistor speaker – it’s a world away from skiffle records by The Vipers and Lonnie Donegan so adored by its creators. There’s a rougher early version featuring departing drummer Pete Best that you can hear on 1995’s Anthology I compilation and in it, something more audibly bluesy emerges, most notably in John’s yearning harmonica, an instrument which, according to Paul, John learned because he “expected to be in jail one day and he’d be the guy who played the harmonica.”
For all of that, no-one would mistake Love Me Do for an American song. In fact, it’s unlikely that you’d even mistake this for a song that was born outside of Liverpool. Its sound seems to travel on the same frequency as the bracing stink of Mersey mud. Love Me Do sounds like hope with its collar up on a chilly morning and a right hand cupped around a cigarette as the left takes a lit match to it. It’s not in a hurry. It’s that boy your mum warned you about, standing outside your workplace with a bunch of flowers. He doesn’t say much but the way you feel when he looks right at you means he really doesn’t need to.
Pre-eminent Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn – currently touring Evolver: 62, a show looking back at the year n which The Beatles broke through – points out that in the rush to venerate, say, Tomorrow Never Knows or A Day In The Life, we run the risk of overlooking some of the incredible creative decisions taken in John and Paul’s earliest songwriting forays. “Let’s not forget that Love Me Do is a song that starts with a blue note [a flattened third or seventh, used more commonly in the blues], which immediately sets it apart from the competition… In those days, vocal and instrumental groups were something of a rarity. And in Love Me Do, you’re listening to a group of musicians who [in concert] are able to accurately replicate the arrangement of their recorded songs – something that was anything but a given in 1962.” For Peter Hamill, who would later go on to form Van der Graaf Generator, the effect of hearing Love Me Do was instant: “I first heard it when I was 13, under the bedcovers, on Radio Luxembourg. I remember the DJ saying ‘maybe England’s answer to the Everly Bros’. And myself going ‘This is the stuff!’”
Some people though, needed to hear it a few times to really come to terms with Love Me Do’s otherness, which explains why Record Mirror, on the week of its release, only gave the song three out of a maximum five in its singles reviews. But beyond the offices of the national music papers that gave them a relatively muted reception, people did notice. “Love Me Do might have ‘only’ reached Number 17,” explains Lewisohn, “but it stayed in the Top 40 for months and was still in there on the week that Please Please Me was released… That wouldn’t have gone unnoticed in the industry.”
Whilst The Beatles might still have gone on to enjoy the same era-defining success without Love Me Do, their story as a recording entity couldn’t have a more perfect beginning than this one. I first got to hear it when it was reissued for its twentieth anniversary. On an episode of Top Of The Pops which also featured Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Culture Club and Blancmange, it sounded like something that slightly predated pop. It sounded like a test transmission. It sounded like levels being checked. Like a spectacle in a theatre whose doors had yet to open. It sounds like the screaming had yet to start.
And now, another four decades on, Love Me Do sounds like nothing waiting for everything to happen to it. It sounds like the first young people with money in their pockets, walking into the void created by post-war affluence and the end of conscription. In this void, you can scream and cry and dance and lose your mind. And in the releases that followed it – think of the intro to I Want To Hold Your Hand, the spaces between the lines in the verses of Please Please Me – The Beatles would make sure their songs had sections where you could do just that. In the words of the late music writer Ian McDonald, “Love Me Do is first faint chime of a revolutionary bell.” Once its intended audience heard it, it was impossible to unhear it. Things could never be the same again.
Love Me Do was released 60 years ago this week. For information about visiting The Beatles’ childhood homes, go to https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/beatles-childhood-homes To go and see Mark Lewisohn’s Evolver:62 shows, head here: https://www.marklewisohn.net/evolver-62/