Interviewed for the Mersey Beat newspaper in April 1962, John Lennon refers to the double-sided brilliance of the new single from The Miracles – What’s So Good About Goodbye and I’ve Been Good To You.
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In the same key too!” So, on The Beatles’ first LP, there were four songs possibly inspired by The Shirelles. The intro was great though it was almost note for note the same as The Shirelles’ It’s Love That Really Counts, but faster. They opened with Please Please Me and had a really good sound. Aaron Williams of The Merseybeats says, “The first time I realised The Beatles were special was when we were on with them at the Majestic Ballroom in Birkenhead. John was intrigued by the pun in Bing Crosby’s 1932 hit, Please: “Please, lend your little ear to my pleas” – and this bit of wordplay inspired Please Please Me. Still, the three-note riff is about the simplest thing you could play on the harmonica, a case of needs must for harp beginner John. However, the main influence on Love Me Do is Roy Orbison’s bluesy B-side from 1961, Candy Man, written by Fred Neil and featuring a harmonica close to Love Me Do. It’s a great thrill to know that our record influenced The Beatles.” Bruce Channel reflects: “We’d heard harmonica on blues records by Jimmy Reed and people like that, and that influenced Hey! Baby. Geoff Taggart, a St Helens musician who wrote for The Shadows, says, “It starts like The Shadows’ Man Of Mystery but it’s really a quicker version of the John Barry Seven’s Rodeo, which came out in 1958.ĭelbert McClinton played harmonica on Bruce Channel’s Hey! Baby and, in the summer of 1962, John Lennon asked him for tips. Rory was wondering how it went and George Harrison and John Lennon said they had heard it and improvised an instrumental which became, with gentle humour, Cry For A Shadow. While The Beatles and Rory Storm & The Hurricanes were in Hamburg in 1961, The Shadows made the UK charts with The Frightened City.
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It’s easy to forget that first and foremost The Beatles were mad about music: let’s look at some of the influences that found their way into some of their best known work.
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There is of course, a fine line between an affectionate tip of the hat and plagiarism music lovers tend to do the former – from prog musicians using classical motifs to hip-hop producers sampling sounds of the past. As George Martin said of George Harrison, “An awful lot of George’s songs do sound like something else.” And in 1985, Paul McCartney joked to Musician magazine, “We were the biggest nickers in town – plagiarists extraordinaire.”Īs we’ll see, there were plenty of instances in which they echoed the past and their contemporaries. Unsurprisingly their sense of adventure, not to mention the sheer volume of material expected of them, meant they acted as musical conduits for their time before transmitting their influences back to the world in Beatle form. With seemingly boundless musical curiosity and a ball-breaking work ethic they did just that, packing more into a decade than anyone before or since. There’s no doubt that a major factor in The Beatles’ success was that they arrived at a time when all of this pop music nonsense we hold dear was new and waiting for somebody to take it by the scruff of the neck.