In 1957, John Lennon met a 15-year-old Paul McCartney at St Peter’s Church Hall fete in Woolton, Liverpool. The pair got on like a house on fire, bonding over their shared love for rhythm and blues. After finding chemistry as friends and musicians, McCartney joined Lennon’s band, The Quarrymen, initially as a rhythm guitarist.
In Barry Miles’ 1997 biography Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, McCartney was quoted explaining how he used to spend hours on end in Lennon’s bedroom, at his aunt Mimi Smith’s house, listening to old-school rock ‘n’ roll records from the likes of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis. They played and sang along to the tracks, eventually finding the confidence to write a handful of songs themselves.
“It’s a lovely thought to think of a friend’s bedroom then,” McCartney pondered. “A young boy’s bedroom is such a comfortable place, like my son’s bedroom is now; he’s got all his stuff that he needs: a candle, guitar, a book.”
He added that playing in Lennon’s small bedroom had a setback, though. “Physically, it was always a bad idea for us to sit side by side on the bed in his bedroom,” he recalled. “The necks of our guitars were always banging.”
One of the most notable early songs written in Lennon’s bedroom was ‘I Call Your Name’, which became popular when The Beatles recorded and released it in 1964. At the start of the 1960s, with lead guitarist George Harrison welcomed to the band, The Beatles still performed live sets mainly comprised of cover songs. The Lennon-McCartney oeuvre was gradually piling up, but they didn’t have the confidence to fully emerge from the protection of covers just yet.
Lennon and McCartney wrote what would become their first UK number-one single on February 28th, 1963 while travelling on their tour bus. “The night Paul and I wrote ‘From Me To You’, we were on the Helen Shapiro tour, on the coach, travelling from York to Shrewsbury,” Lennon once recalled of the song (via Anthology). “We weren’t taking ourselves seriously – just fooling around on the guitar – when we began to get a good melody line, and we really started to work at it.”
“Before that journey was over, we’d completed the lyric, everything,” he added. “I think the first line was mine and we took it from there. What puzzled us was why we’d thought of a name like ‘From Me To You’. It had me thinking when I picked up the NME to see how we were doing in the charts. Then I realised – we’d got the inspiration from reading a copy on the coach. Paul and I had been talking about one of the letters in the From You To Us column.”
“I remember John and Paul coming up to me to ask if I would like to hear a couple of songs that they had just written,” remembered Shapiro. “They were looking for opinions because they were undecided about which should be their next single. We crowded around a piano and Paul played, while the two of them sang their latest composition. One was ‘Thank You Girl’, and the other was ‘From Me To You’, which I liked best.”
The Beatles had just released their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, at the time and had planned to follow it up with ‘Thank You Girl’. Following the road-bound writing session and with Shapiro’s endorsement, however, they decided to reconsider.
“We’d already written ‘Thank You Girl’ as the follow-up to ‘Please Please Me’,” Lennon recalled. “This new number was to be the b-side. We were so pleased with it, we knew we just had to make it the a-side, ‘Thank You Girl’ the b.”
Listen to The Beatles’ ‘From Me To You’ and its b-side, ‘Thank You Girl’, below.
