17 May 1963
When you think of The Beatles, what’s the first song that comes to mind? Probably not ‘From Me To You’—their first official number one in both the UK and Ireland—or their prior single ‘Please Please Me’, which topped every published UK singles chart except the actual official one. (The next two 1963 Beatles singles, ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, which broke the States for them in early 1964, both only reached no. 2 in Ireland.) Maybe the ’63 moptop Beatles seem unsophisticated to us now in the context of their later innovation and evolution. Also, I won’t discount a slight unconscious bias against those two singles as mere teenybopper pop songs, as opposed to their move towards rock. However, these are still the records that cracked the charts for them, detonated Beatlemania, and set them on their way as—forgive me for stating the obvious—the most influential and beloved band of all time. What can ‘From Me To You’ tell us about why the whole Beatles thing happened?
True, it starts with a relatively twee “da-da-da da-da-dum-dum da!” vocal part doubled up on a skiffly harmonica and served on a rather stale rhythm. But what’s fresh and appealing here is John’s throaty, raucous singing, which Paul does his best to match, like rougher Everly Brothers. Also, they then hard-steer into a showy unison falsetto top note (“if there’s anything I CAN DO!”) for the pre-chorus build. Add to that Ringo’s splashy cymbals, the off-piste chord changes into and through the mid-section, the cheeky “hoooo!” to cap that mid-section, and then the satisfying resolution of chords and melody for the final chorus: familiar Beatles tropes today but to the youths of 1963 all brand-new. ‘From Me To You’ may not have the clipped, jarring starkness of ‘Love Me Do’ or the barrelling frenzy of ‘She Loves You’ but it still shows inventive strangeness and boisterous energy – or to borrow a phrase, twist and shout.
