Beatlemania and touring years

Beatlemania and touring years (1963–1966)
UK popularity, Please Please Me and With The Beatles
In the wake of the moderate success of "Love Me Do", "Please Please Me" met with a more emphatic reception, reaching number two in the UK singles chart after its January 1963 release. Martin originally intended to record the band's debut LP live at The Cavern Club. Finding it had "the acoustic ambience of an oil tank", he elected to create a "live" album in one session at Abbey Road Studios. Ten songs were recorded for Please Please Me, accompanied on the album by the four tracks already released on the two singles. Recalling how the band "rushed to deliver a debut album, bashing out Please Please Me in a day", an Allmusic reviewer comments, "Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh, precisely because of its intense origins."Lennon said little thought went into composition at the time; he and McCartney were "just writing songs à la Everly Brothers, à la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought of them than that—to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant."

Released in March 1963, the album reached number one on the British chart. This began a run during which eleven of The Beatles' twelve studio albums released in the United Kingdom through 1970 hit number one. The band's third single, "From Me to You", came out in April and was also a chart-topping hit. It began an almost unbroken run of seventeen British number one singles for the band, including all but one of those released over the next six years. On its release in August, the band's fourth single, "She Loves You", achieved the fastest sales of any record in the UK up to that time, selling three-quarters of a million copies in under four weeks. It became their first single to sell a million copies, and remained the biggest-selling record in the UK until 1978 when it was topped by "Mull of Kintyre", performed by McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings. The popularity of The Beatles' music brought with it increasing press attention. They responded with a cheeky, irreverent attitude that defied what was expected of pop musicians and inspired even more interest.



The Beatles' iconic "drop-T" logo, based on an impromptu sketch by instrument retailer and designer Ivor Arbiter, also made its debut in 1963. The logo was first used on the front of Starr's bass drum, which Epstein and Starr purchased from Arbiter's London shop. The band toured the UK three times in the first half of the year: a four-week tour that began in February preceded three-week tours in March and May–June. As their popularity spread, a frenzied adulation of the group took hold, dubbed " Beatlemania". Although not billed as tour leaders, they overshadowed other acts including Tommy Roe, Chris Montez and Roy Orbison, US artists who had established great popularity in the UK.Performances everywhere, both on tour and at many one-off shows across the UK, were greeted with riotous enthusiasm by screaming fans.Police found it necessary to use high-pressure water hoses to control the crowds, and there were debates in Parliament concerning the thousands of police officers putting themselves at risk to protect the group.In late October, a five-day tour of Sweden saw the band venture abroad for the first time since the Hamburg chapter. Returning to the UK, they were greeted at Heathrow Airport in heavy rain by thousands of fans in "a scene similar to a shark-feeding frenzy", attended by fifty journalists and photographers and a BBC Television camera crew. The next day, The Beatles began yet another UK tour, scheduled for six weeks. By now, they were indisputably the headliners. Please Please Me was still topping the album chart. It maintained the position for thirty weeks, only to be displaced by With The Beatles which itself held the top spot for twenty-one weeks. Making much greater use of studio production techniques than its "live" predecessor, the album was recorded between July and October. With The Beatles is described by

Allmusic as "a sequel of the highest order—one that betters the original by developing its own tone and adding depth." In a reversal of what had until then been standard practice, the album was released in late November ahead of the impending single "I Want to Hold Your Hand", with the song excluded in order to maximize the single's sales.With The Beatles caught the attention of Times music critic William Mann, who went as far as to suggest that Lennon and McCartney were "the outstanding English composers of 1963". The newspaper published a series of articles in which Mann offered detailed analyses of The Beatles' music, lending it respectability. With The Beatles became the second album in UK chart history to sell a million copies, a figure previously reached only by the 1958 South Pacific soundtrack