A Hard Day’s Night -The Definitive Beatlemania Album

The later Beatles material may be the most fashionable but this is the Fab Four at the moment they conquered the world.

It also captured The Beatles at their most urgent; you still get the impression that this was still a band with something to prove and that they were enjoying the whole process of doing so.  All of the songs on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ were The Beatles’ own compositions – all by Lennon & McCartney – and there isn’t a Ringo vocal to be heard.  By their next album, ‘Beatles For Sale’, they were beginning to sound exhausted – some of the focus had been lost during the relentless touring, filming and recording and they were back to recording cover versions, albeit temporarily.  ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ showed The Beatles at their most unified and – what’s more – there are no songs with the express purpose of pleasing mums and dads.  The phenomenon of Yesterday hadn’t happened yet.

The Beatles at this point were still a young person’s band and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ sounds youthful.  Even today everything about the album has a modern sheen, from its timeless cover design to the songs themselves.  The Beatle’s later work, although undeniably of a high (and sometimes higher) quality, sounds comparatively of its time and place.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – if any individual band sums up the 1960s it is The Beatles –  but no other album the band ever released captured the excitement of Beatle mania as well as ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.  The album is shameless pop at its most perfect and much of it is rock n’ roll.

Furthermore, after ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ the popular music industry would never be the same.  The Beatles proved for once and for all that a band could write its own material and perform it as a unit without involving any outsiders.  In 1964 this was unthinkable.  Young people had previously only been allowed to sing what adults had written for them but The Beatles proved that this no longer had to be the case.  Young people could speak for themselves and the music industry could make a huge profit from enabling this to happen.  The Beatles were certainly not the first artists to write their own material but they were certainly the catalysts.

What is remarkable about ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is how consistently good it is.  Only half of the tracks were used in the soundtrack and the others were of equal quality.  There are some weaker songs; ‘When I Get Home’ is a bit of a plodder even if it is executed well and benefits from a great Lennon vocal and ‘Tell Me Why’ is similar, but all the rest of the songs are nothing short of brilliant.  By doing this The Beatles were breaking the rules were albums were concerned in 1964.  Previously albums had strictly been cash-in on the single affairs, laden with filler and recycled previous successes.  The Beatles upped the ante and as a consequence ‘the album’ as we now know it was born.  Since ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was soundtrack album, it was the first that the band released singles from (they would also do this on ‘Help!’.  However, it is would easy to imagine that ‘I Should Have Known Better’ and ‘You Can’t Do That’ could have easily topped the charts.

One particular band, The Rolling Stones, already on the scene in 1964, started to write their own songs as a direct consequence of The Beatles’ success.  In the 1960s it became expected and would become impossible to maintain any level of success without doing so, the music scene was evolving so rapidly.  The Beatles were the most successful at seeming to stay ahead because of their superior ability to write songs in practically any genre.

Furthermore, since The Beatles’ line-up consisted of not one, not two, but three songwriters (and latterly even Ringo had a go), the competition even within the band was fierce.  The tensions this created would eventually cause the band to implode in 1970, but in 1964 it was still early days and it was merely helping to maintain a very high quality of songs. John Lennon and Paul McCartney still wrote some of their songs together but were hugely competitive. The song ‘Hard Day’s Night’ was written by Lennon in response to McCartney’s obvious hit-single-in-waiting ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and both would go onto be massive Number One transatlantic hit singles.  Furthermore they are still both among the most loved and memorable songs in The Beatles’ superlative catalogue.

This is very much a Lennon album though and as such features some of best songs and vocal performances.  In 1964 he was still the de facto leader of the band and he was carrying most of the song writing weight (even McCartney has admitted this in his more honest moments).  Ten of the thirteen songs on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ are Lennon compositions, which is why he does most of the lead vocals.  However, McCartney’s contributions are all outstanding, even if there are only three of them.  Why was Lennon doing the bulk of the writing at this period?  Perhaps it was down to the style of the music the band was performing at this juncture.  Lennon excelled at writing and performing immediate fully-formed pop/rock songs whereas McCartney was more at home spending some time crafting his material.  For example, McCartney has begun writing Yesterday on the set of ‘Hard Day’s Night’ and even his ‘Michelle’ dates from this period.  In this light, it is small wonder that Lennon was coming up with the finished material; he was the most impatient about getting things done.  They were both very different songwriters with talents to match their temperaments, but they both needed each other to bring out the best in their work.

For all of these reasons and simply because I enjoy it, I think ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is my favourite album by The Beatles.  It may not be their most musically sophisticated but it is the definitive Beatle mania album and it not only allowed them to go on to change popular music forever but enabled others to do so too.