Please Please Me

Please Please Me is the debut studio album by English rock band the Beatles. Produced by George Martin, it was released in the United Kingdom on EMI's Parlophone label on 22 March 1963. The album's 14 tracks include cover songs and original material written by the partnership of band members John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The Beatles had signed with EMI in May 1962 and been assigned to the Parlophone label run by Martin. They released their debut single "Love Me Do" in October, which surprised Martin by reaching number 17 on what would become the official UK singles chart. Impressed, Martin suggested they record a live album and helped arrange their next single, "Please Please Me", which topped the NME singles chart. Finding the Cavern Club, the band's venue in their native Liverpool, unsuitable for recording, Martin switched to a simple studio album. The Beatles recorded Please Please Me in one day at EMI Studios on 11 February 1963, with Martin adding overdubs to "Misery" and "Baby It's You" nine days later. The four songs from their two previously released singles were added to the album, although a different version of "Love Me Do" was used for the album. The album was well-received in Britain, where it remained in the Top 10 for over a year, a record for a debut album that stood for half a century. The presence of several songs written by band members Lennon–McCartney (credited as "McCartney–Lennon" at the time) was unusual and marked the emergence of a "self-contained rock band". On the other hand, the album was not released in the US, where the band sold poorly for most of 1963; after the stateside emergence of Beatlemania, Vee-Jay Records released a mild abridgment of the album as Introducing... The Beatles in early 1964, while...