I think as musicians they had an emotional vocabulary right away. John’s lower harmony – “Love, love me do, you know I love you” – drones under Paul’s and then when he sings “Someone to love, somebody new” it’s so plaintive and spooky. The harmonica was so haunting, as were the harmonies. I associate that record with going to the fair, by which time you’d hear the Beatles everywhere. In the US, Love Me Do wasn’t the first single like in the UK. We dressed like them and even learned to talk like we were from Liverpool.
The family were cooking chicken and Rice-A-Roni. Everything about that moment is imprinted.
#LYRICS NO NO SONG RINGO STARR TV#
I watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on a little black and white TV at my cousin’s house. Photograph: Mike McCartney/PA ‘John and Paul had lost their mothers – you can hear the melancholy’ Rickie Lee Jones ‘When they sat opposite each other with guitars something unique came out’ … Paul McCartney and John Lennon writing in McCartney’s childhood home on Forthlin Road in Allerton, Liverpool. George Martin said: “You’ve just made your first No 1.” Then they just took off. It’s still a great record but a few weeks later they went in the studio again to do Please Please Me. The Beatles got the idea of a prominent harmonica riff from Bruce Channel’s Hey Baby, which influenced John. Strangely enough the odd phrase “love me do” is in the first Cliff Richard film, The Young Ones. They’d embraced everything – all the great music coming out of the US, R&B, even music hall – but when they sat opposite each other with guitars something unique came out. Prior to the Beatles, every band had a lead singer, but John and Paul were two singers upfront. ‘When they sat down with guitars something unique came out’
#LYRICS NO NO SONG RINGO STARR FULL#
In 1966 we were supposed to go and see them at the Dodger Stadium, but then we were told it would be unsafe for us to go because we’d get mobbed and security would have their hands full with the Beatles.
I just thought: “Whatever it is, I love it.” They were a huge inspiration to us. I couldn’t think of any other records in the Top 40 that had Love Me Do’s interaction between two guys, and the phrase “love me do” didn’t even seem to be proper English. I just thought: “ Whatever this is, I love it!”’ Michelle Phillips, the Mamas and the Papas Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP ‘It didn’t seem like proper English. The first pressing of the single Love Me Do from 1962, signed by all four Beatles is displayed at Sotheby’s auction rooms in London, in 2020. When John was asked what his favourite new release was and he went “Shout by Lulu”, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Two years after it came out they were on Ready, Steady Go. With Love Me Do, they took the beat from black American R&B music and encompassed it in something original. They sang as teenage boys spoke – the language of love, the torments, the heartbreak and the hope. They also wrote the songs themselves, which revolutionised the music industry worldwide. The three-part harmonies reminded me of the sort of thing you’d hear in church, deep soul. Love Me Do was clearly influenced, but different. I’d heard Big Mama Thornton singing Hound Dog and Barrett Strong doing Money (That’s What I Want). Before them, most British music had seemed like a lightweight copy of American records, but Love Me Do felt like a spiritual awakening. My teenage hormones were raging, and the Beatles looked so cute, not at all threatening. When I was 13 we were obsessed with the radio in the way kids now are obsessed with TikTok. It still makes me smile when I hear it and I take enormous pride in thinking that it was the launchpad for me. In terms of what they did later, Love Me Do is the bit that gets jettisoned once the rocket is in orbit, but it was vital to the whole process. Lennon and McCartney’s voices weren’t swathed in reverb like records were then, and their sense of melody was phenomenal. It might have been the harmonica intro – the only other song I remember with a harmonica break back then was Frank Ifield’s I’ll Remember You – but Love Me Do was head and shoulders above Freddie and the Dreamers or Gerry and the Pacemakers or any of those bands with similar accents. I don’t know why that song more than any other would leap out at me, but it was the first song I ever sang. I was three years and two months old when Love Me Do came out, but I had a plastic toy guitar and whenever the song came on the radio I would stand on a stool and sing along. ‘I sang to it with a plastic guitar when I was three years old’
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