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Mon 21 April 2025 19:45, UK
It’s hard to think of any generation of rock music that didn’t have The Beatles as a strange omnipresence. Oh, there were still the traditional rock and roll stars that managed to get the party rocking like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, but as soon as the Fab Four played on the Ed Sullivan Show, it felt like the dam had burst and every single soul on the planet had found the new love of their lives within the span of a few minutes. While that love has endured to this day, George Martin had a certain idea of how everything came together.
When looking at where the band started, though, George Martin could be considered the ringleader in getting their music to sound the way it did. The Beatles were more or less a kickass bar band when they hooked up with Martin at Abbey Road Studios, but when he suggested working on some of their extravagant pieces, they developed into the hit machines that they were in their prime.
And considering the rapid pace of their records, they never exactly struck out all that often. Even for a band that had been thrown around the world with no real rhyme or reason, the fact that their “worst” album is Beatles for Sale from their mid-period says a lot, given how tunes like ‘Eight Days A Week’ and ‘Every Little Thing’ land on that album.
Before the moptop wigs started coming out and before the silver screen came calling with A Hard Day’s Night, Please Please Me was the first time that Martin was considerably impressed with their work. The title track had been in the can for a while, but whereas the ballad version of the tune sounded decent, the uptempo energy of the real version was enough to convince Martin they had made their number-one single.
Though it did end up charting, tunes like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ had a much better shot at reaching the big time once it crossed over to the US. The American market may have been far different from what they had been used to at home, but there was an international agreement that ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was one of the finest melodies that Lennon and McCartney had put together.
“Eventually the flood gates opened in America in 1964 with ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,’ and from that point on it was mayhem.”
George Martin
Some people may be more partial to tracks like ‘She Loves You’, but in Martin’s eyes, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was the moment where nothing would be the same again, saying, “Eventually the flood gates opened in America in 1964 with ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,’ and from that point on it was mayhem. But you see, I didn’t spend all that much time with them because they were on tour all the time.”
And looking at the way they worked, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ started a bit of a chain reaction by accident. Bob Dylan had been intrigued by what the band had been doing, but after mishearing the lyrics as ‘I get high’ instead of ‘I can’t hide’, it was only natural for him to introduce the lads to pot, which in turn shaped their entire personality going into projects like Rubber Soul.
It might be too far-reaching to blame the trajectory of the band’s entire career on one simple song, but ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ did at least get the ball rolling for them to become a musical monster. No one knew how big that four-headed monster would grow, but Martin was more than thrilled to be along for the ride.
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