A HARD DAY'S NIGHT @ 60

CLAANNG! It starts movie the record and it seizes ears. Those two seconds of clamour, like a steel gate being broken open, have been tortured under audio microscopes for decades. The verdicts vary but tend to land around an F9 (F chord with an added G note). But it's not just an F9, anyone could do that, it's a group effort. George on his 12 string playing the whole six courses with the G on the top on the high E. John  plays on an acoustic. Paul is playing a D on his bass and George Martin some inversion of F on the piano. There's even a pinched cymbal for the toppermost of the poppermost frequencies. It's like the whole band crushed into a cube which then explodes.

It never repeats. It doesn't have time. John comes in with the vocal; "it's been a haaard daaay's night..." joined by the band on the fourth syllable. From that point that wrought steel of the insisted note that climbs to the sharp blue note ("workeeeeeng") hooked everyone who heard it. This is followed in the forward momentum by the rolling climb ("but when I get home to you ...") to the modified blue note phrase in perfect completion. The middle eight breaks ranks with the G major tonality of the verse by literalising the key signature and playing B minor instead of major for the modulation to E minor. Um, ok, that's getting yawny, isn't it? Ok, it's a slight deviation but an important one as it smooths over the dramatics of the minor key to keep the bluesy attack going. It's a song of happy wife happy life that a man in his mid-twenties might imagine with the sexual rewards packed into words like ok and alright which might feel vapid now were it not for the force of the song. The solo breaks out cinematically a movie theme riff made with piano and varispeed 12 string (George eventually did play the speedy bits at the peak of the phrase live but for the recording he needed to play them slower). The song ends on an even more elongated vowel stretched over a single note and the sweet surprise of a pretty jingling phrase that works with the fret position George was playing for the opening chord, as though by this stage, after all that conjugal exhaustion it's now a ringing fragment.

I Should Have Known Better is a big bright love song that starts with a sweet harmonica figure and continues with a verse that features the same note elongation as the title track. The minor key middle eight is so streamlined it doesn't quite sound minor. George comes in with the band's new secret weapon, the Rickenbacker 360/12, playing a ringing verse melody and ending on a chiming G 6th. For me, it's standard Beatles fare and if I listen to the record, I'll leave it on. Besides, it's completely overshadowed by what came before it and what's just around the corner.

If I Fell starts with a Lennon vocal over strummed acoustic guitar. Then the harmonies kick in and it takes over the heads of anyone who hears it. The silvery close harmonies of this ballad of adoration are meltingly beautiful. Any comparisons with other contemporary harmony masters like The Everly Brothers or The Beach Boys fall away as the chord progression stretches the key of D major beyond showtune sophistication they were already familiar with. Then, when the middle eight comes up it's like another warp into a parallel key. I can remember scarcely believing the beauty of this song that wasn't the kind of big shouty pop rock I knew their early singles were, it just took things somewhere else. (Aside: in the stereo version the second middle eight seems to end with McCartney's voice breaking. After decades of thinking this it was revealed to be an erroneous move on the faders. The mono version of the exact same recording doesn't have it.)

George's vocal is up next with a throwaway written for him by John and Paul. It's fun with a kind of cod Spanish nightclub feel sneaking in through the Mersey beat. 

And I Love Her is a Paul ballad in a minor key with a haunting reverby vocal and some tasteful classical guitar support from George. While you can still hear the influences of Bandstand balladeers of the time the song escapes the cheesiness that might envelope it through the seriousness of the vocal and a strong transition from the middle eight to the following verse where the stern minor chords return. If the contemporary production wasn't out in such force it might have been pleasantly spooky.

Tell Me Why gets us back to big and shouty and works fine but I'd never put it on just to hear it in isolation. 

Can't Buy Me Love closes the old side one in a bluesy shuffle by Paul with something like his Long Tall Sally scream. It was a single and has a decent enough anti materialistic message, preferring love over the trinkets of love. A big stomper to end the side.

That's important. In the U.K. you turned the disc over and heard a bunch of other new Beatles songs. In the U.S. you heard session muso versions of side one songs as instrumentals. The Beatles are not playing on the tracks and they do sound listless and note-hittingly perfect. This Capitol label trickery didn't start nor end with this and it was the same on the next soundtrack LP for Help. Utter ripoff.

Side two of the real LP kicks off with a loud snare crack before Anytime at All burst forth. The chorus opens with shouty harmonies of the title phrase but then the verse changes. It's Lennon solo and in several takes so his alternate lines can come in before he could properly finish the previous phrase. Considering the double tracking going on (from the previous album on) whereby individual vocalists would do two vocals matched as exactly as possible to beef up the sound of the voice, the overlapping lines meant that some fairly fancy work was happening in the studio. I don't know if they ever tried it live but it would have been possible for McCartney to fill in the alternate lines. It's an engaging romantic rocker with a lot of close mic-ed piano playing closely with the 12 string.

I'll Cry Instead is a shuffling sour grapes number by Lennon with a sneering vocal that is belied the lyric. He'd like to do all sorts of things since he lost his girl but he can't so he'll cry instead. It's not a big ironic twist but it comes across as a self effacing smile (unlike a similar later Run For You Life which just gets more problematic as the years go by). 

Things We Said Today is McCartney being a clever dick with chord progressions but also delivering an engaging love song with a melancholy minor key verse and brightly harmonious part B. Then the middle eight bangs in and it just stops behaving like it's in any key with a coolcat melodic diversion that leads easily into the next verse. George's triplet minor chords in the intro, breaks and fade are something we haven't heard before on a Beatles record. It's a quiet but important innovation. I can thoroughly recommend the live version of this (Eight Days a Week soundtrack CD) which those triplets are ringing and that far away from being power chords and the big yelping intros to the middle eights. This version feels tame by comparison but it shares some eeriness with And I Love Her.

When I Get Home is a big shouting stomper like Tell Me Why, only shoutier and stompier. I sometimes skip it. 

You Can't Do That is an unsmiling replay of I'll Cry Instead. A bluesy figure on the 12 string opens the cowbell clunking shuffle in which Lennon as a jealous lover is berating his partner non stop for two and a half intense minutes. It was the B-side of the title track as a single. Viv Albertine describes the intensity of first hearing it in her great Clothes Music Boys, feeling a song as a whole body experience in a way that approaches alarm. While there's no violence threatened the tone in the powerful Lennon vocal contains no forgiveness.

And then, as a closer, the yearning I'll Be Back comes in with acoustic guitars and a close harmony chorus that starts minor but ends major. The verses are John in aching mode, stretching the vowels to breaking and falling back into the melancholy chorus. Even with the early '60s boxed in production the pain is audible and the phrases have the beauty of the best folk music. Beautiful.

The major achievement of this set, aside from the quality of the music itself, was that it was the first album wholly written by the band (and the only one consisting of solely Lennon McCartney songs). No rock band had done that yet. It was put together while on tour over six months of 1964 and in anticipation of the accompanying film. While most of the side one songs get a look in in the movie at various moments, the film is a concentrated comedic depiction of life at that unimaginable fame peak so a lot of the tunes get lost in the flow (though And I Love Her and If I Fell are given what amount to proto performance videos). But, after the accelerating times they were getting through, to fill two sides of an LP with untried material of entirely original composition is extraordinary. 

There has recently been a kind of shift among younger fans of the band to hold this higher than the usually lauded last five albums. Part of that is youthful perversity (like mine when I championed Revolver over the likes of Abbey Road) but part of it is from the unignorable feat of thirteen songs with really only two filler tracks (that some are now affecting). Take the context of the scheduling and film away and you still have a strong two sides of vinyl record, packaged with a kind of decorated contact sheet of publicity photos where the band are pulling faces. It's a mild effect now but in the days when the smiles on record covers had to be painted on, it would have come across as endearingly cheeky. And that's what this is, as soaring as some of its music is and as clearly indicating of the near future's greatness, this is a cheeky record that seems to be mugging at the world's camera and saying: "go on, then, do better."