请取悦我 (1963)

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 EMI's American label Capitol Records divided the material from Please Please Me across multiple albums. Other countries also received different versions of the album, which continued until 1987, when the entirety of the Beatles catalogue was brought to CD and internationally standardised to the UK albums. Please Please Me remains critically acclaimed; it was voted 39th on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" in 2012, and number 622 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums in 2000.

Background

The Beatles originated in the skiffle scene of Liverpool in the late 1950s as the Quarrymen, and by 1961 had solidified their lineup with John Lennon on rhythm guitar, Paul McCartney on bass, George Harrison on lead guitar, and Pete Best on drums. The band mostly played cover songs, although Lennon and McCartney had a budding songwriting partnership that also contributed material. After a stint in Hamburg backing English singer Tony Sheridan and releasing a single with Sheridan, "My Bonnie", on which they were credited as "The Beat Brothers", they returned to Liverpool in late 1961. Shortly after their return they were approached by Brian Epstein, a music store manager who recognized the group's local popularity and became the group's new manager. After a failed audition at Decca Records at the beginning of 1962, Epstein was eventually able to sign the group to EMI that May.