How Paul McCartney wrote The Beatles’ debut hit when he was just 16

Paul McCartney wrote one of The Beatles‘ earliest hits when he was just sixteen, and the veteran songwriter has broken down how he did it.

McCartney explained how he managed to bring together the influences, words, and instrumental sections of one of the Fab Four’s finest songs. Speaking to Barry Miles for the Many Years from Now biography, McCartney explained how Love Me Do came together. Though the band believed the song to be a “bit wet” at first, it was a smash success and set The Beatles off on a chart-topping trajectory. While McCartney would say Love Me Do “was completely co-written,” he did explain how he had introduced the song at an early session when he was just sixteen.

He said: “It might have been my original idea, but some of them really were 50-50s, and I think that one was. It was just Lennon and McCartney sitting down without either of us having a particularly original idea.

“In Hamburg, we clicked. At the Cavern we clicked. But if you want to know when we ‘knew’ we’d arrived, it was getting in the charts with ‘Love Me Do’. That was the one. It gave us somewhere to go.”

McCartney’s songwriting partner, John Lennon, added: “Introducing our own numbers started around Liverpool and Hamburg. Love Me Do, one of the first ones we wrote, Paul started when he must have been about fifteen.

“It was the first one we dared to do of our own. This was quite a traumatic thing because we were doing such great numbers of other people’s, of Ray Charles and [Little] Richard and all of them. It was quite hard to come in singing ‘Love Me Do’. We thought our numbers were a bit wet. But we gradually broke that down and decided to try them.”

Lennon would also suggest that Please Please Me, the album which features Love Me Do, was a chance to capture the band in an environment similar to their early live shows.

Lennon 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.”

Lennon would confirm Martin’s influence in the studio would help them find a better route through the title track too. He said: “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.”

Ringo Starr also hailed Love Me Do as a song that made all the difference for The Beatles. He added: “For me, that was more important than anything else. That first piece of plastic. You can’t believe how great that was. It was so wonderful. We were on a record!”