After a lot of debate, Paul and John decide to revisit “Love Me Do,” the best of their early songs. The first thing they do is rewrite it in the key of G, which gives the song a great bluesy sound, and John—influenced by a new song called “Hey! Baby”—incorporates a harmonica part they all like. Pete suggests adding a skip beat, a kind of fluctuation in tempo. It’s a strange idea, but the result is solid. John and Paul accept it.

A week later, they’ve got two more new songs: “Ask Me Why” and “P.S. I Love You.” By the time the Beatles return home, on Saturday, June 2, they’ve got three brand-new Lennon-McCartney songs for EMI’s Parlophone label.

Their recording is in less than four days.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

It’s only rock ’n’ roll but I like it.

—“It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It)”

After three days of feverish rehearsals, the Beatles set off for London on Tuesday, June 5, and on the late afternoon of June 6, they lug their road-worn equipment to Abbey Road and into EMI’s huge Studio Two.

The studio had “great big white studio sight-screens, like at a cricket match, towering over you,” Paul recalls, “and up this endless stairway was the control room. It was like heaven, where the great gods live, and we were down below. Oh God, the nerves.”

He’s hoping to keep the band’s loosely guarded secret. “None of us really knows how to read or write music. The way we work it is like: just whistling. John will whistle at me, and I’ll whistle back at him.”

Today, the band will be recording four songs selected by Parlophone: “Besame Mucho” and three originals—“Love Me Do,” “P.S. I Love You,” and “Ask Me Why.”

When the engineers, dressed in white lab coats, tell them it’s time, everyone’s nerves spike.

They all look at one another. It’s Us against Them. Liverpool against London.

The red recording light goes on.

*  *  *

The man operating the tape machine is Chris Neal. He listens to the Beatles play a couple of songs, then looks to Norman Smith, the balance engineer, and says, “I’m not all that impressed.”

Smith replies, “Oi, go down and pick up George from the canteen and see what he thinks of this.”

George is George Martin, the head of Parlophone.

The label’s publishing arm, Ardmore and Beechwood, is eager to obtain potentially lucrative song copyrights, so George makes the practical determination that he can turn this band into a profitable version of EMI superstars Cliff Richard and the Shadows. “That was how my mind was working at the beginning,” he explains, “looking for the possibilities of one of them being the lead singer. When I met them, I soon realized that would never work.”