FEATURE:
A Musical Explosion and Revolution
The Beatles’ She Loves You at Sixty
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I know I wrote about…
PHOTO CREDIT: Apple Corps
The Beatles’ Hey Jude recently (as it is fifty-five this month), but I couldn’t pass by the sixtieth anniversary of She Loves You. It was released in the U.K. on 23rd August, 1963. Possibly their most important and defining song, there is no doubt this track changed the face of Pop music. It was a Pop revolution and explosion! In 1963, nothing as thrilling and exciting had come along. Some may say Little Richard and Elvis Presley were equal, but in terms of a single song changing things and seemingly coming out of nowhere - I don’t think music will ever see the like again! The Beatles singles up to that point were great. They seemed to improve with every release. As an original composition, they had not released into the world anything as wild and hugely impactful. Instantly one of the most memorable and greatest songs ever, you can hear influences of Rock & Roll legends and artists The Beatles grew up around. Parts Little Richard with some elements of girl groups of the 1950s, this is a joyous call! I am going to bring in a few features that explore the seismic 1963 song. The single set and surpassed several sales records in the United Kingdom, in the process setting a record in the United States as one of the five Beatles songs that held the top five positions in the charts simultaneously (on 4th April, 1964). It was the top-selling single of the 1960s there by any artist. She Loves You has appeared in lists of the greatest sons ever. Here are more details:
“She Loves You" is a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and recorded by the Beatles for release as a single in 1963. The single set and surpassed several records in the United Kingdom charts, and set a record in the United States as one of the five Beatles songs that held the top five positions in the American charts simultaneously on 4 April 1964. It is their best-selling single in the United Kingdom, and was the best selling single there in 1963.
In November 2004, Rolling Stone ranked "She Loves You" number 64 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In August 2009, at the end of its "Beatles Weekend", BBC Radio 2 announced that "She Loves You" was the Beatles' all-time best-selling single in the UK based on information compiled by The Official Charts Company”.
I am going to go to an authoritative source on all things The Beatles. The Beatles Bible give us the background and details about a song that, sixty years after its release, remains this thing of utter wonder. Every time I hear it – and I have listened to it hundreds of times – it hits me and physically moves me:
“Written by: Lennon-McCartney
Recorded: 1 July 1963
Producer: George Martin
Engineer: Norman Smith
Released: 23 August 1963 (UK), 16 September 1963 (US)
Available on:
Past Masters
1 (One)
Anthology 1
On Air – Live At The BBC Volume 2
Live At The Hollywood Bowl
Personnel
John Lennon: vocals, rhythm guitar
Paul McCartney: vocals, bass guitar
George Harrison: lead guitar, vocals
Ringo Starr: drums
The song with which Beatlemania truly began, ‘She Loves You’ was released as a single on 23 August 1963. It remains their best selling single in the UK.
It was again a she, you, me, I, personal preposition song. I suppose the most interesting thing about it was that it was a message song, it was someone bringing a message. It wasn’t us any more, it was moving off the ‘I love you, girl’ or ‘Love me do’, it was a third person, which was a shift away. ‘I saw her, and she said to me, to tell you, that she loves you, so there’s a little distance we managed to put in it which was quite interesting.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show on 9th February, 1964
The song was mostly written on 26 June 1963, in a room in the Turk’s Hotel in Newcastle, prior to The Beatles’ second performance at the city’s Majestic Ballroom. A true collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, ‘She Loves You’ distilled the essence of excitement in their music, and became a defining moment of their early career.
I remember it was Paul’s idea: instead of singing ‘I love you’ again, we’d have a third party. That kind of little detail is apparently in his work now where he will write a story about someone and I’m more inclined to just write about myself.
John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
McCartney’s original idea was to have a call-and-response song, with him singing the title line and the others answering with “yeah, yeah, yeah”. Lennon, however, persuaded him otherwise.
John and I wrote ‘She Loves You’ together. There was a Bobby Rydell song [‘Forget Him’] out at the time and, as often happens, you think of one song when you write another.
We were in a van up in Newcastle. I’d planned an ‘answering song’ where a couple of us would sing ‘She loves you…’ and the other one answers, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ We decided that that was a crummy idea as it was, but at least we then had the idea for a song called ‘She Loves You’. So we sat in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it.
Paul McCartney
Anthology
They finished writing ‘She Loves You’ the following day, at McCartney’s family home in Forthlin Road, Liverpool.
We sat in there one evening, just beavering away while my dad was watching TV and smoking his Players cigarettes, and we wrote ‘She Loves You’. We actually finished it there because we’d started it in the hotel room. We went into the living room – ‘Dad, listen to this. What do you think?” So we played it to my dad and he said, ‘That’s very nice, son, but there’s enough of these Americanisms around. Couldn’t you sing, “She loves you. Yes! Yes! Yes!”‘ At which point we collapsed in a heap and said, ‘No, Dad, you don’t quite get it!’ That’s my classic story about my dad. For a working-class guy that was rather a middle-class thing to say, really. But he was like that.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
In the studio
The Beatles recorded ‘She Loves You’ five days after it was written, during a five-hour session in Abbey Road’s studio two.
Documentation for the session no longer exists, but it was taped on 1 July 1963, the same day as its b-side, ‘I’ll Get You’.
They were especially proud of the final chord, which was previously undiscovered territory for them. As producer George Martin explained to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn:
I was siting in my usual place on a high stool in studio two when John and Paul first ran through the songs, George joining in on the choruses.
I thought it was great but was intrigued by the final chord, an odd sort of major sixth, with George doing the sixth and John and Paul the third and fifths, like a Glenn Miller arrangement. They were saying, ‘It’s a great chord! Nobody’s ever heard it before!’ Of course I knew that wasn’t quite true.
George Martin
The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Mark Lewisohn
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I am surprised more documentaries and podcasts have not been made specifically about She Loves You. It is undeniably one of the most important songs ever. It was a tidal wave that blew up Pop music and announced The Beatles as a band who were in a league of their own. Maybe not seen as the very best Beatles song ever – there is incredibly tough competition! -, it is undoubtably one of their most loved and vital. A track that saw them claim a number one spot and, in the process, properly and definitively ignite Beatlemania. I can only imagine what it was like hearing She Loves You first-hand in 1963! Far Out Magazine, in a feature from in 2021, discussed how She Loves You was this seismic revolution. That is not overstating it at all:
“The Beatles were already sizzling hot property before they released ‘She Loves You’ in 1963. Still, the song elevated them from being the flavour of the month into an unavoidable institution that were more than just a pop group. The Beatles were the only force in music that mattered. More importantly, on an artistic level, the song elevated their songwriting to an unprecedented degree and transformed pop music in the process.
It was only their fourth single, yet, they’d already had one number one hit to their name before ‘She Loves You’ became their second, and the view from the top of the apple tree is a sight that they soon became comfortable looking out from.
The track is a fixture embedded in every one of our minds; whether you were one of those who lived through the swinging ’60s or it soundtracked car journeys throughout your childhood, the song carries a universal appeal that awards it an undeniable classic status. Despite the thousands of times we’ve all heard ‘She Loves You’, those sweet harmonies still sound equally graceful as they did all those years ago.
On a wider level, the track modified how John Lennon and Paul McCartney approached songwriting in general, sparking a revolution that can still be felt within the arena of pop today. As Macca told Barry Miles: “It was again a she, you, me, I, personal preposition song. I suppose the most interesting thing about it was that it was a message song, it was someone bringing a message.”
Adding: “It wasn’t us anymore, it was moving off the ‘I love you, girl’ or ‘Love me do’, it was a third person, which was a shift away. ‘I saw her, and she said to me, to tell you, that she loves you, so there’s a little distance we managed to put in it which was quite interesting.”
Furthermore, in Anthology, McCartney elaborated on his point: “John and I wrote ‘She Loves You’ together. There was a Bobby Rydell song [‘Forget Him’] out at the time and, as often happens, you think of one song when you write another. We were in a van up in Newcastle. I’d planned an ‘answering song’ where a couple of us would sing ‘She loves you…’ and the other one answers, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ We decided that that was a crummy idea as it was, but at least we then had the idea for a song called ‘She Loves You’. So we sat in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it.”
After getting the bones of the song together, the band took it to McCartney’s home, and that’s where ‘She Loves You’ came to life. “We sat in there one evening,” McCartney recalled, “Just beavering away while my dad was watching TV and smoking his Players cigarettes, and we wrote ‘She Loves You’. We actually finished it there because we’d started it in the hotel room.
“We went into the living room – ‘Dad, listen to this. What do you think?” So we played it to my dad and he said, ‘That’s very nice, son, but there’s enough of these Americanisms around. Couldn’t you sing, “She loves you. Yes! Yes! Yes!” ‘At which point we collapsed in a heap and said, ‘No, Dad, you don’t quite get it!’ That’s my classic story about my dad. For a working-class guy that was rather a middle-class thing to say, really. But he was like that.”
Writing from somebody else’s eyes would change how The Beatles created music forever, propelling them lightyears ahead of any other beat band. It showed progression, and it was an early evolution from a band that only kept on enhancing with each pressing release”.
I am going to end with a feature from The Guardian. In 2020, they ran down their one hundred greatest U.K. number one singles. Coming in at number three – you would think it would be number one! – was the iconic and timeless She Loves You:
“To hear She Loves You bursting out of a radio in the last week of August 1963 was to recognise a shout of triumph. Everything the Beatles had promised through the first half of the year found its focus in their fourth single, an explosion of exuberance that forced the world, not just their teenage fans, to acknowledge their existence.
The double-jolt of Ringo Starr’s drums kicked off a record that, unusually, began with the song’s chorus: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Straight away that Americanised triple “yeah” (Paul McCartney’s father, the first to hear the completed song, asked if they could change it to “yes, yes, yes”) offered a fanfare for a culture on the brink of irreversible change. It marked the moment when the Beatles moved from being just another pop sensation to a national obsession: misquoted by prime ministers, cursed by barbers, viewed by schoolteachers as the vanguard of a revolution that must be stopped. And before long, almost universally adored.
Sharp ears had detected its pre-echo in Love Me Do, their first single, released the previous October: the unfamiliar northern rawness of the two matched lead voices and a plaintive bluesy harmonica over a slouching rhythm. It had scraped into the top 20. Three months later, in January 1963, the mounting interest in this group from Liverpool was answered by the urgency of the follow-up. On Please Please Me, the harmony vocals were more adventurous, the lead guitar and drums filled the gaps in the tune with syncopated phrases and the harmonica was imaginatively embedded rather than highlighted in the overall sound. With young listeners now recognising the Mersey sound when they heard it, the record went to No 1 in the NME and Melody Maker charts. From Me to You arrived in April, a bit of a disappointment in terms of adventurousness – it was a song with a sweet tooth – but catchy and driving enough to foment their increasing popularity and stay at No 1 for seven weeks.
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles backstage at The Regal in Cambridgeshire on 26th November, 1963/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix
It was still at the top when Lennon and McCartney started writing She Loves You in their hotel room after a concert at the Majestic theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 8 June, the penultimate night of a 21-date UK tour in which they shared the bill with Roy Orbison and their fellow Liverpudlians Gerry and the Pacemakers. (Orbison had been the original headline act, but such was the response to the Beatles that they were promoted to share top billing and close the show.) The following day, before setting off for the tour finale in Blackburn, they finished it at McCartney’s family home, 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton, south Liverpool, a terraced red-brick council house owned by the National Trust since 1995 (and later viewed by a YouTube audience of 52m in the episode of Carpool Karaoke featuring McCartney).
This one had a new confidence, beginning with the bold move of getting away from a first-person narrative and starting with the chorus before leading into the memorable opening lines of the first verse: “You think you’ve lost your love / Well I saw her yesterday / It’s you she’s thinking of / And she told me what to say” Apart from the indelible yeah-yeah-yeah (which gave its name to France’s yé-yé youth culture), the principle attraction was the moment at which the singers sang a falsetto “Oooooh!” and shook their mop tops, triggering screams of ecstasy that wouldd make their way around the globe.
The playing also showed an increased sureness, particularly in George Harrison’s lead guitar and the imaginative drum fills that were all the evidence required to demolish the opinion of anyone who ever dismissed Starr as a hod-carrier. They all benefited from the way the song was recorded at Abbey Road. Producer George Martin and studio engineer Geoff Emerick had found a way of surrounding a four-piece beat group with a corona of reverb that matched the sound of American studios. They pushed the instruments higher in the mix, challenging the voices and creating a new intensity. The instruments were no longer the “rhythm accompaniment” of earlier forms of British popular music. She Loves You presented an integrated whole, a sound of collective creativity that demolished the supremacy of solo artists, setting a trend that would dominate pop music for a generation.
Four years later, in the summer of 67, the song would provide one of the most poignant moments in the group’s entire output when McCartney’s voice materialised through the random collage of sound on the long fade-out of All You Need Is Love, singing that simple phrase: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Already they were looking back, with a hint of wistfulness, at the time when history was being made and no one could imagine what lay ahead”.
I recently attended I Am the EggPod live at Opera Holland Park. Samira Ahmed (who has interviewed Paul McCartney and is a huge Beatles fan) was asked by host Chris Shaw what her favourite Beatles song was. She said She Loves You. That got applause from the audience. Shaw noted how unusual it is for a song to get applause! That is the power and importance of She Loves You. It turns sixty on 23rd August. I hope Pual McCartney and Ringo Starr reflect on a song that took them worldwide. I think it is one of the most important songs ever. I know there are other Beatles things going on – the 1962-1966 (The Red Album) and 1967-1970 (The Blue Album) albums are being reissued with more tracks -; the final song from the band to be released, Now and Then, is out soon…but this anniversary is really important. The song changed culture, threw the Pop rulebook out, and it is one of the most celebrated and important songs ever. It is often voted as one of the best songs ever. Sixty years later, and there is nothing like this explosive and utterly invigorating and soul-moving song. She loves you and…
YOU know you should be glad!