Paul McCartney Admitted He ‘Didn’t Have Such a Hand’ in Writing ‘Please Please Me’: ‘More John Than Me’
When The Beatles released “Please Please Me” in early 1963, both Paul McCartney and John Lennon received writing credit. The pair wanted to be the next Rodgers and Hammerstein, and they established the precedent of earning joint credit for their songs. According to McCartney, though, he didn’t have all that much to do with writing the song. He admitted that “Please Please Me” was more of Lennon’s song than his own.
Paul McCartney said John Lennon wrote more of ‘Please Please Me’ than he did
After achieving success with “Love Me Do,” The Beatles exploded with the release of “Please Please Me.” It was a song McCartney and Lennon worked on together, but McCartney admitted that it was more of Lennon’s song than his.
“We’d had a fair bit of practice writing over the years, though our legendary ‘first one hundred’ was probably in reality less than half that amount of songs,” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology. “‘Please Please Me’ was more John than me; I didn’t have such a hand in it.”
McCartney said he had more to do with other songs they released around this time.
“‘PS I Love You’ was more me,” he said. “‘From Me To You’ was both of us, very much together. (I remember being very pleased with the middle eight because there was a strange chord in it, and it went into a minor: ‘I’ve got arms that long…’ We thought that was a very big step.) ‘She Loves You’ was custom-built for the record we had to make. ‘Love Me Do’ was a bit of a ‘two-song.’”
Paul McCartney said George Martin made them speed up ‘Please Please Me’
“Please Please Me” was a success for the band, but audiences might have received it differently if they heard the original version. Longtime Beatles producer George Martin said the song was slow and boring when he first heard it.
“In the first year, I had the final decision on songs (I didn’t later on, but I did then), but they persuaded me to let them have their own songs on both sides of their first single,” Martin said. “I was still thinking that we should release their recording of ‘How Do You Do It.’ They said, ‘Couldn’t we do one of our own, “Please Please Me?”’ When I heard it originally, it was a Roy Orbison type of song, a very slow rocker, with a high vocal part, rather dreary, to be honest.”
Martin told them to speed up the song, which helped it immensely.
“We sang it and George Martin said, ‘Can we change the tempo?’” McCartney recalled. “We said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Make it a bit faster. Let me try it.’ And he did. We thought, ‘Oh, that’s all right, yes.’ Actually, we were a bit embarrassed that he had found a better tempo than we had.”
He had problems with the way they credited the songs
As McCartney pointed out, he and Lennon received shared credit for their songs, even when one had more to do with writing it than the other. While he liked that this positioned them as the next Rodgers and Hammerstein, McCartney bristled at the way he received credit for the songs.
“I wanted it to be ‘McCartney/Lennon’, but John had the stronger personality and I think he fixed things with Brian [Epstein] before I got there,” he said. “That was John’s way. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that; I wasn’t quite as skillful. He was one and a half years older than me, and at that age it meant a little more worldliness.”
Still, the Please Please Me album has songs attributed to McCartney/Lennon.
