I couldn’t think of any other records in the Top 40 that had Love Me Do’s interaction between two guys, and the phrase “love me do” didn’t even seem to be proper English. I just thought: “ Whatever this is, I love it!”’ Michelle Phillips, the Mamas and the Papas Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP ‘It didn’t seem like proper English. The first pressing of the single Love Me Do from 1962, signed by all four Beatles is displayed at Sotheby’s auction rooms in London, in 2020. When John was asked what his favourite new release was and he went “Shout by Lulu”, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Two years after it came out they were on Ready, Steady Go. With Love Me Do, they took the beat from black American R&B music and encompassed it in something original. They sang as teenage boys spoke – the language of love, the torments, the heartbreak and the hope.
They also wrote the songs themselves, which revolutionised the music industry worldwide. The three-part harmonies reminded me of the sort of thing you’d hear in church, deep soul. Love Me Do was clearly influenced, but different. I’d heard Big Mama Thornton singing Hound Dog and Barrett Strong doing Money (That’s What I Want). Before them, most British music had seemed like a lightweight copy of American records, but Love Me Do felt like a spiritual awakening. My teenage hormones were raging, and the Beatles looked so cute, not at all threatening. When I was 13 we were obsessed with the radio in the way kids now are obsessed with TikTok. It still makes me smile when I hear it and I take enormous pride in thinking that it was the launchpad for me. In terms of what they did later, Love Me Do is the bit that gets jettisoned once the rocket is in orbit, but it was vital to the whole process. Lennon and McCartney’s voices weren’t swathed in reverb like records were then, and their sense of melody was phenomenal. It might have been the harmonica intro – the only other song I remember with a harmonica break back then was Frank Ifield’s I’ll Remember You – but Love Me Do was head and shoulders above Freddie and the Dreamers or Gerry and the Pacemakers or any of those bands with similar accents. I don’t know why that song more than any other would leap out at me, but it was the first song I ever sang. I was three years and two months old when Love Me Do came out, but I had a plastic toy guitar and whenever the song came on the radio I would stand on a stool and sing along. ‘I sang to it with a plastic guitar when I was three years old’
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