A song which features on Please Please Me is John Lennon attempting to write “a Roy Orbison song.”
Lennon would confirm as much in interviews after the release of The Beatles‘ debut album. In an attempt at simplifying the arrangement of the song, which George Marin would call “fussy”, Lennon stripped the track down and “changed the tempo” to give it a sound which still stands as one of The Beatles’ earliest originals. The title track, Please Please Me, left the band thrilled with the results and, according to Lennon, the band were thrilled to be recording it. Almost two decades after its release and Lennon still sounded fond of the song, admitting in an interview with Playboy Magazine he had been inspired by Pretty Woman hitmaker Roy Orbison. Lennon would also cite Bing Crosby as an influence on Please Please Me, a song which the band recorded soon after Love Me Do.
Lennon, speaking in 1963, said: “That record tried to capture us live, and was the nearest thing to what we might have sounded like to the audiences in Hamburg and Liverpool. You don’t get that live atmosphere of the crowd stomping on the beat with you, but it’s the nearest you can get to knowing what we sounded like before we became the ‘clever’ Beatles.
“Our recording manager (George Martin) thought our arrangement was fussy, so we tried to make it simpler. We were getting tired though, and just couldn’t seem to get it right. In the following weeks we went over it again and again.
“We changed the tempo a little, we altered the words slightly, and we went over the idea of featuring the harmonica just as we’d done on Love Me Do. By the time the session came around we were so happy with the result, we couldn’t get it recorded fast enough.”
Later on, Lennon would share the Orbison and Crosby influence which guided the song. Speaking in 1980, Lennon says Only the Lonely by Orbison had been a big factor in his writing process for Please Please Me.
He said: “Please Please Me is my song completely. It was my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song, would you believe it? I wrote it in the bedroom in my house at Menlove Avenue, which was my auntie’s place.
“I heard Roy Orbison doing Only The Lonely or something. That’s where that came from. And also I was always intrigued by the words of Please Lend Your Ears To My Pleas, a Bing Crosby song. I was always intrigued by the double use of the word ‘please.’ So it was a combination of Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison.”
Paul McCartney would go on to confirm Lennon’s influences for Please Please Me, though says it’s thanks to producer George Martin that the song sounds as it does. McCartney said: “It’s very Roy Orbison when you slow it down. George Martin up-tempo’d it. He thought it was too much of a dirge, and probably too like Orbison. So he cleverly sped us up… and we put in the little scaled riff at the beginning, which was very catchy.”
