Recorded in a single marathon 10-hour session at Abbey Road studios for under 400 pounds, 'Please Please Me' reached number one on the British album charts on this date and stayed there for 30 weeks. The album's raw energy, built on cover songs and a handful of Lennon-McCartney originals, announced a songwriting partnership and a cultural phenomenon that would upend the music industry on both sides of the Atlantic within a year.
Producer George Martin scheduled the entire album to be recorded in one day, February 11, 1963, treating it essentially as a live performance captured on tape, since the Beatles' touring schedule left little studio time. John Lennon, suffering from a heavy cold, had to be coaxed through the searing vocal on 'Twist and Shout,' the album's final track, recorded last because everyone knew it would wreck his voice; he reportedly downed milk and Zubes throat lozenges between takes.
The album's chart-topping run of 30 consecutive weeks was so dominant that it was finally dislodged only by the Beatles' own follow-up, 'With the Beatles.' Within a year, the band would conquer America too, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show to an estimated 73 million viewers, but this quieter British triumph in the spring of 1963 marked the true starting gun of Beatlemania and a transformation in how pop albums were written, marketed, and heard.