History: Early Years Of The Beatles

• Beatlemania and touring years (1963–1966)
- UK popularity, Please Please Me and With The Beatles
In the wake of the moderate success of "Love Me Do", "Please Please Me" met with a more emphatic reception, reaching number two on the UK singles chart after its January 1963 release. Martin originally intended to record The Beatles' debut LP live at the Cavern Club. Finding it had "the acoustic ambience of an oil tank", he elected to create a "live" album in one session at Abbey Road Studios. Ten songs were recorded for Please Please Me, accompanied on the album by the four tracks already released on the two singles. Recalling how the band "rushed to deliver a debut album, bashing out Please Please Me in a day", an Allmusic reviewer comments, "Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh, precisely because of its intense origins." Lennon said little thought went into composition at the time; he and McCartney were "just writing songs à la Everly Brothers, à la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought of them than that—to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant."
Released in March 1963, the album reached number one on the British chart. This initiated a run during which eleven of their twelve studio albums released in the United Kingdom through 1970 hit number one. The band's third single, "From Me to You", came out in April and was also a chart-topping hit. It began an almost unbroken run of seventeen British number one singles for the band, including all but one of the eighteen they put out over the next six years. On its release in August, the band's fourth single, "She Loves You", achieved the fastest sales of any record in the UK up to that time, selling three-quarters of a million copies in under four weeks. It became their first single to sell a million copies, and remained the biggest-selling record in the UK until 1978 when it was topped by "Mull of Kintyre", performed by McCartney and his post-Beatles band, Wings. The popularity of their music brought with it increasing press attention. The band members responded with a cheeky, irreverent attitude that defied what was expected of pop musicians and inspired even more interest.