17 April 1964
I’ll be honest: I thought we’d be seeing more Beatles number ones than this. Anyway, it’s mid-1964 and Ireland gets only its second Fab Four chart-topper. For comparison, in America ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was the third number one in a row by The Beatles, after ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, plus the whole US top five was Beatles singles. Now that’s Beatlemania! By contrast, in Ireland we seemed to be hedging our bets on this moptop fad and piling our chips on showbands. (‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ both reached no. 2 in the Irish charts, so it’s not as if they were left rotting on the vine, but still.) Anyway, the rate of Beatles Irish number ones will pick up from here, slightly: for instance, a famous UK chart ‘injustice’ of 1967 also happens in Ireland. More on that in due course.
On the face of it, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ isn’t the most radical or inventive early-phase Beatle hit: its chorus lyric is a shrink-wrapped cliché, musically the track has a dusty old jazzy-skiffly swing, and the whole never escapes the slight whiff of “gotta write a follow-up hit!” What ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ does have is distilled essence of Beatlemaniac energy, thanks mainly to the raspy top-note vocal harmonies and Ringo’s thumping final chorus fill. Also, the “my friend” tag lifts it out of twee romance into something worldly and knowing; a throwaway touch, perhaps, but it plants a seed for their more thoughtful ’65-66 songwriting.
Factoid time! ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ is one of only two songs I have so far ever attempted at karaoke. It’s also a rare Beatles track recorded outside Britain – in Paris in January 1964 while the band were on an 18-date residency and pressed into taping German versions of their previous singles ‘Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand’ and ‘Sie Liebt Dich’. (Go on, you can figure out those.) It was written by Paul in his room at the Hôtel George V and then, with George Martin having popped across the Channel to join them, recorded at the old EMI studios in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt with later overdubs back in London. The George V is still an exclusive Paris hotel; I was once in a room there similar to Paul’s where he wrote ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, probably. And the EMI Boulogne-Billancourt studios have long since made way to a block of apartments where I’m pretty sure I ended up one night playing Guitar Hero – or in another apartment building so close by as to be statistically identical. Spooky or what?
