Love Me Do / P.S. I Love You - the Beatles First UK Single

The first two original songs that The Beatles recorded for Parlophone were "Love Me Do" & "P.S. I Love You" and they were released as the two sides of their very first UK single on October 5, 1962. They were the introduction of The Beatles to the UK. In 1963 they would be included on The Beatles first album, Please Please Me.

A-Side: "Love Me Do"

While this song pales in comparison to just about everything that The Beatles recorded in the next seven years, it is still an important song because it is the first Beatles song a lot of people in the UK heard. It was the song that sparked Beatlemania (although it would take "Please Please Me" & "She Loves You" to really set it on fire.)

It's an extremely simple song which is based on only three chords and a simple four note riff harmonica riff (played by John Lennon.) But what set the song apart from the pop songs of the time was it's "rough" sound (the pop hits of the day were very "clean")

It was also very unusual for the time for a band to have actually written it's own song.

To say that The Beatles changed everything in pop music is actually a bit of an understatement. It's hard to really understand how revolutionary they were in their early period until you get a feel for how tame (read: "lame.") pop music was at that time.

These days it's easy to look back at The Beatles early work and see it as very "soft" or very "pop" (ie: not "rock") but that perspective is skewed by all of the changes that have came since then. Most important is to realize that The Beatles are directly (or indirectly) responsible for those changes. Sure by today's standards "Love Me Do" isn't very rock n roll but in 1962, it definitely was.

That's why when people compare manufactured "boy bands" like New Kids on the Block, NSync, The Backstreet Boys, or the Jonas Brothers to the early Beatles they are so far off (and yes I have heard uninformed people make that comparison before.)

These modern boy bands are extremely soft compared to the best music of their day and they rarely have any creative input on their music. They are the opposite of what the early Beatles were and that's why they come and go like the fads they are, while The Beatles remain popular and relevant 47 years after they released their first single.

B-Side: "P.S. I Love You."

While definitely not as "important" as "Love You Do" in some ways it's a better predictor of the brilliant music The Beatles would later record. It's much more musically "sophisticated" (having some unusual chords and song structure for a pop song of it's day) than "Love Me Do" and some of the musical techniques used in this song would be expanded upon in the future.

I also think it's interesting how much different this B-Side is from the flip side. It's a totally different style of song with a totally different arrangement. This is an early sign of the kind of amazing variety of music The Beatles would record over the next seven years.