Video will appear as you scroll through the story
The Beatles · S5 E4
With the Beatles
The second album. Robert Freeman's half-shadow cover photo becomes the most imitated image in music. Every song a hit, every track a statement
August 1963. Robert Freeman asks John, Paul, George, and Ringo to stand in a hotel corridor in Bournemouth, tilts the light from a single window across their faces, and takes the most imitated photograph in music history.
The Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever (1967). The artistic ambition that began with With The Beatles, where John and Paul started writing songs that went beyond simple love lyrics, reaches full bloom here. You can draw a straight line from the songwriting growth on their second album to this.
Strawberry Fields Forever, The Beatles (1967)
John wrote this in Almería, Spain, while filming How I Won the War, drawing on childhood memories of playing in the grounds of Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army children's home near Mendips. The recording went through multiple transformations: a quiet acoustic demo became a full band arrangement, then a dense orchestral production with cellos, trumpets, and swarmandal. George Martin famously spliced two completely different takes in different keys and tempos together, speeding one up and slowing the other down until they matched. The join is nearly invisible, though devoted fans still debate exactly where it falls.
Sources
Lewisohn, Mark. "The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions." Hamlyn, 1988/2018.
Martin, George. "All You Need Is Ears." St. Martin's Press, 1979.
Replacing Themselves
With The Beatles arrives on November 22, 1963, and goes straight to number one, knocking Please Please Me off the top spot. The Beatles become the only act in UK chart history to replace themselves at number one. The album sells half a million copies in its first week, and Robert Freeman's stark half-shadow portrait changes what album artwork can be.
Sources
Lewisohn, Mark. "Tune In." Crown Archetype, 2013.
“I was using a half-shadow technique I'd picked up from some Parisian fashion photographers. I just took them into the corridor of the hotel where there was a window with a maroon curtain, and that was all the light I needed.”
— Robert Freeman, The Beatles Anthology, 2000
TAP TO REVEAL: What else happened on November 22, 1963, the day With The Beatles was released?
Palace Court Hotel, Westover Road, Bournemouth
Robert Freeman photographed the Beatles in this hotel's corridor in August 1963, using only the light from a single window. George Harrison wrote his first original song, 'Don't Bother Me,' while sick in bed in this same building during the same week.
Don't Bother Me, The Beatles (1963)
George Harrison's first original composition, written while he was sick in bed at the very same Bournemouth hotel where Freeman shot the cover photo. The title is literally George telling people to leave him alone while he had the flu. It's rough around the edges compared to Lennon-McCartney's work, but it marks the moment George stepped out of their shadow and started building his own voice.
Don't Bother Me, The Beatles (1963)
Read the lyrics while you listen. George later dismissed this song as an exercise to see if he could write at all. But the restless minor-key mood and the blunt frustration in the words are already distinctly his. The quiet Beatle had something to say.
How many of the fourteen tracks on With The Beatles were original compositions (not covers)?
With The Beatles proves they're not a flash in the pan, but Britain isn't big enough anymore. On December 26, 1963, Capitol Records finally releases 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' in America, and the invasion begins.
0 XP earned this session