The Beatles win the Mersey Beat magazine poll naming them Liverpool’s top group, beating out Gerry and the Pacemakers and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. For Christmas, Brian sends them each a gift—a traveling alarm clock. On the back of the business card he uses as a gift tag, he writes “My little bit to get you all on in time.”

On December 27, the Beatles close out the year at the Cavern with “The Beatles’ Christmas Party,” but Pete Best is out sick.

They need a drummer, and the other three band members have a particular one in mind: Ringo.

When Ringo sits in, “it felt complete,” George will later say. “It just really happened, it felt really good. And after the show we were all friends with Ringo and we liked him a lot and hung out with him, whereas Pete—he was like a loner. He would finish the gig and then he would go.”

But Ringo joins Tony Sheridan’s backing band in Hamburg, and Pete’s still their drummer that first day of 1962.

Decca calls the studio recording a “commercial test.” For the Beatles, it’s the audition of their lives. The recordings they’d made in Germany were done in an auditorium connected to a high school. This is their first time in a real recording studio.

John and the others plug their guitars into the studio amps, and Pete sets up his kit behind a screen, but the sound levels will all be controlled by the men standing behind the glass, adjusting the controls, watching the four of them.

The red light goes on. The recording has started.

Here we go.

*  *  *

“Look,” Brian tells the boys back in Liverpool as they wait to hear from Decca. “If I get a huge offer, they won’t take you in leather.”

John says, “All right, I’ll wear a suit—I’ll wear a fucking balloon if somebody’s going to pay me! I’m not in love with the leather that much.”

Paul nods. It’s time for a change. “It was a bit old-hat anyway, all wearing leather gear.” But…are they selling out?

“I didn’t really see it as selling out,” George says. “I just saw it as playing a game: if it takes suits to get us on the television, and if we need to be on television to be able to promote ourselves, then we will put on suits. We would wear fancy dress, whatever it took to get the gigs.”

“And while we’re on the subject,” Brian says, “if you really want to get into bigger places you have to stop eating onstage, stop swearing, stop smoking.”

“We’ll stop,” John agrees. Onstage at least. “Brian was trying to clean our image up,” John later explained. “Fucking hell! It was a choice of making it, or still eating chicken onstage. We respected his views.”