The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night Review

A Hard Day’s Night is The Beatles’ first great album. Between the cover ditties of Please Please Me and the compilation-like snooze of With The Beatles, the first rip-roaring effort from the Fab Four comes in the form of a movie soundtrack. They were bigger than all at the time and their image established a need for more of it. An exceptional movie, and a soundtrack just as strong, followed. A Hard Day’s Night has some of their very best works, and a few of the finest moments for each member. Until the release of Rubber Soul, the best two albums from The Beatles were motion picture soundtracks. Between this and Help!, and the later release of Magical Mystery Tour, the care taken into streamlining these releases is magnificent. But look a little closer and the magic starts to fade. A Hard Day’s Night is proof enough that the band can work over chipper, pop sounds. 

One of the most recognisable guitar chords in history opens A Hard Day’s Night, a perfect opener where the thrills of love conquering the horrors of the working day are lost to the energy of the song. Screeches, instrumental bliss and a constant percussion. It is the triple bill of brilliance from The Beatles here and is a phenomenal, often overlooked piece of their discography. Though it may sound flippant, much of A Hard Day’s Night is comprised of love songs. Nothing wrong with that, at all. The Beatles wrote some of the very best in class when it comes to love and efforts like I Should Have Known Better and If I Fell are an example of that. A standout title track is the real draw here – a reason to be thrilled. There is much more to love about A Hard Day’s Night, from its ever-present capturing of the 1960s aesthetic to the boy band boom which The Beatles would drift from just a few years later. It is of the times, and those times are captured well.  

Just a few elevate themselves beyond the period, with Can’t Buy Me Love, perhaps because of its upbeat tempo, doing so. Beyond its value as truly enjoyable music, what A Hard Day’s Night also proves is the frenetic studio energy The Beatles held, and how quickly they could capture it can be heard on the McCartney-led Can’t Buy Me Love. Sophisticated growth is what benefits A Hard Day’s Night. Where Please Please Me was a chase of the pop generalities of the time, A Hard Day’s Night presents a sharper yet still completely free lyrical style. Dances, happiness and togetherness are still the everyday choices made by I’m Happy Just to Dance and juxtaposed on I’ll Cry Instead, but there is still charm to it. And I Love Her is a standout for these moments, though not because of McCartney, but the blur between Starr on bongos and George Harrison on lead guitar. These instrumental efforts are the flag-bearer of quality.  

The Beatles patched the holes in their previous two works but there is still a way to go. A Hard Day’s Night is great fun – light in spots like Tell Me Why but these are the must-hear moments in a discography which, just three years later, would feature some of their strongest works. Solid rock work which relies more on the cool partnership between Starr and Harrison than it does on anything Lennon and McCartney wrote here. Their craft would form far better on future works, this collection of songs a tad too stuck in the rock of the times, and it was The Beatles who were advancing it with efforts like Any Time At All. A definitive step in music history, that much is for sure, but the sameness of those B-side additions is a shock to the system. Sleek pop rock which ties in with a film that, unlike the album, captured the personalities of the Fab Four.