By Gordon R. Thompson
The Beatles were unlikely successes on London’s record charts in December 1962. Northerners with schoolboy haircuts who wrote and performed their own songs, their first record “Love Me Do” had risen slowly up British charts, despite lack of significant promotion by their publisher and record company, and without an appearance on national television. Moreover, while they should have been touring Britain to promote the disc, they instead played a pre-booked residence at the Star Club in Hamburg. The disc should have flopped.
Some have speculated that the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein arranged for the family business, North End Music Stores to purchase enough copies of the record to move it in the charts. “Fiddling” with the charts was hardly unknown both in Britain and in the US. The notorious British manager Don Arden (Sharon Osborne’s father) later bragged that he could move the rank of a disc with a discrete monetary investments.
The most widely read music papers of the day — the weeklies The New Musical Express and Melody Maker — contained interviews with artists, managers, producers, and songwriters, listed tour dates and contract changes, featured recently released discs in reviews, and ranked the week’s top recordings. By today’s standards, their methods were primitive, blending a few calls to big merchants with personal intuition. An informed manager or producer could move a release in the charts simply by purchasing the right number of discs in the right shops or by persuading the right people that particular artists were the next big thing.
Click here to view the embedded video.
The curious chart history of “Love Me Do” sees the song appear first on Record Retailer’s charts shortly after its release and then two weeks later on Melody Maker’s charts. In Record Retailer, the disk would reach #17 in the 27 December 1962 issue, while in Melody Maker, it reached #21 the first week of January. The recording entered the charts of Disc weeks after the other papers and climbed no higher than #24 in December.
If these charts represent record sales, one wonders why they should differ. Record Retailer prided itself on having its finger on the pulse of record merchandising by polling its readership: Britain’s retail disc merchants. Earlier in 1962, when a flu swept through Decca’s manufacturing plant disrupting their ability to press records, both Melody Maker and the Daily Mail published charts showing Elvis Presley’s newest recording (“Rock-a-Hula Baby”) suddenly holding the #20 position, despite the absence of disks to sell. Melody Maker insisted that it had placed the disk in the charts because of comments from retailers combined with a previous announcement of its release. Melody Maker’s stated sources — and their data on record sales — suggest that the venerable music paper relied on selected stores and intuition. Another variable in these numbers recognizes that some figures may reflect the number of discs purchased by shop owners as distinct from the number of disks purchased by customers.
Two weeks after “Love Me Do” entered Record Retailer’s charts, NME apparently gave the recording a quick guess placement, before dispatching it to presumed history. An October 26 article by one of NME’s writers, Alan Smith, extols the group and the budding talent of its songwriters. “Newcomers to the Charts: Liverpool’s Beatles Wrote Their Own Hit” makes the connection between the Beatles and Billy Fury and promoted the potential of the recording. The NME’s editors apparently seized upon the convergence of sales reports in other papers and the press releases to write something they thought would sell a few papers.
Over at Record Retailer, however, the disk climbed slowly with little apparent promotion, peaking at the end of the year, setting the stage for the release of their second single, “Please Please Me,” which the Beatles had already recorded in November. Breaking into the charts represented a remarkable feat for a new group, let alone one from the provincial and industrial north. Perhaps Liverpudlian Billy Fury had paved the way for them with three significant hits in 1962: “Letter Full of Tears” (charts 15 March, UK #32), “Last Night Was Made for Love” (charts 3 May; UK #4), and “Once upon a Dream” (charts 19 July, UK #7).
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That cold and dark December would see Ray Davies meet British bluesman Alexis Korner and work his way into Dave Hunt’s Rhythm and Blues Band and play at the Piccadilly Jazz Club. There, another new group, the Rolling Stones (who had just landed a bass player in the form of Bill Wyman) would impress him. Something musical was beginning to happen in London. Something raw and exciting.
Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Gordon Thompson’s posts on The Beatles and other music here.
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The post Charting success: The Beatles, December 1962 appeared first on OUPblog.
By Gordon R. Thompson
As a regional businessman and a fledgling band manager, Brian Epstein presumed that the Beatles’ record company (EMI’s Parlophone) and Lennon and McCartney’s publisher (Ardmore and Beechwood) would support the record. This presumption would prove false, however, and Epstein would need to draw on all of the resources he could spare if he were to make the disc a success. He began with what he knew from the retail end of the industry and commenced rallying Liverpudlians to write letters to both Radio Luxembourg and the BBC asking them to play “Love Me Do.”
Just as the stations XERF (in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico) and CKLW (in Windsor, Ontario, Canada) were able to broadcast deep into the United States with transmitters many times more powerful than FCC-regulated American stations, a station in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg carpeted most of Western Europe. Perhaps surprisingly, Radio Luxembourg (broadcast in the Medium Wave band) was British-owned and its English-language service became a primary outlet for UK businesses whose advertising the BBC declined. (The BBC refused to broadcast anything that suggested product promotion.) Radio Luxembourg suffered its sometimes-scratchy signal; but British listeners tuned in every night to embrace the pop music that Aunty Beeb would not play.
Expo 1958 Radio Luxembourg by Wouter Hagens. Creative Commons License.
British corporations like EMI and London music publishers like Essex Music directly controlled much of the station’s airtime by buying broadcast blocks during which they played pre-recorded programs. Indeed, on Monday 8 October 1962, the Beatles taped an interview at EMI’s headquarters in London, which Radio Luxembourg broadcast along with their recording of “Love Me Do” on Friday 12 October. (George Harrison later recalled the thrill of first hearing himself on that radio broadcast.) The Liverpool letters solicited by Epstein that arrived in Luxembourg eventually arrived at EMI in London where the manager hoped they would catch corporate attention and result in better domestic support for the Beatles and their releases.
Tony Barrow, whom Epstein had originally contacted at Decca Records in his quest to get the Beatles a recording contract, began work for NEMS (North End Music Stores) as the Beatles’ publicist. (He could hardly have imagined how his job description would evolve from soliciting the press’s attention to holding them at arm’s length.) As a reviewer and a liner-note writer, Barrow had often worked from press materials prepared by agents and managers. These releases could vary significantly in kind and quality, but among them, Barrow thought that the press kits from Leslie Perrin’s office (which had represented London’s infamous Raymond’s Revue Bar, among others) were particularly effective. Notably, a color-coded press kit walked readers through a client’s story, which made a reviewer’s tasks easier. Barrow appropriated this format in his preparations for promoting the Beatles.
The role of the press agent involved finding the right people to contact and, for that, Barrow needed names, addresses, and phone numbers. Coincidentally, he knew someone who had recently left Decca’s press office. The Beatles’ new agent presumed that the individual would have taken a copy of the company’s mailing list and, after a casual meal, they reached a mutually beneficial agreement. Brian Epstein’s new part-time press manager walked away with a cache of contacts.
Barrow began by introducing the Beatles to London’s music press, escorting the Liverpudlians from the Denmark Street offices of New Musical Express to Fleet Street’s Melody Maker. They were willing to go almost anywhere to meet anyone with access to print or broadcast media. For example, on 9 October 1962 (the day after taping the Radio Luxembourg program), they visited the offices of Record Mirror so that writers there could see how different they were from other entertainers and to hopefully experience some of the charm that had swayed George Martin.
The mixed results both encouraged the band and its manager, and disappointed them. Alan Smith, writing in the New Musical Express (26 October 1962), briefly introduced the band, highlighting how Lennon and McCartney had written their “hit.” However, if you were the Beatles searching the papers for even the briefest mention (which they did weekly), you found little.
Brian Epstein in a 1967 interview would justifiably take credit for some of the band’s early success, citing his diligence and perseverance. The slow climb of “Love Me Do” up the charts would be his vindication. By December 1962, despite setbacks, the single increased sales and nudged into the top twenty on the most respected (if selectively read) chart. They were poised for something and they were sure ‘twas for success.
Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Gordon Thompson’s posts on The Beatles and other music here.
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The post Selling the Beatles, 1962 appeared first on OUPblog.
Yoko Ono, the widow of Beatles legend John Lennon, has given permission for 150 of Lennon’s personal letters to be published in a single volume.
According to The Guardian, Alan Samson from the Orion Publishing Group acquired world rights to the collection. Publication is set for October 2012–the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ hit release, Love Me Do. The video embedded above shows the band playing that song.
Here’s more from the article: “Orion saw off competition from all the big-hitting publishing houses who went to Davies’s home in Kentish Town, north London, to make their bids…Samson would not disclose how much Orion had paid for the right to publish the book, although it is thought to be in excess of £500,000 but less than £1m quoted in other media.”
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