Any group that started as early as The Beatles will probably have some awkward moments to look back on. Every first step of a band tends to look like old baby pictures later in their career, and it can get more than a little bit cringy when musicians look back on what they thought was cool. Although the Fab Four have a certain sheen surrounding every one of their songs, Paul McCartney admitted that there was a little bit of embarrassment playing pieces like ‘Boys’.
At the time, though, anything went when it came to the group’s live shows. As much as John Lennon and McCartney were slowly turning into one of the best songwriting duos in England, the only way to hook people in on the touring circuit was to play the rock and roll favourites first, which generally included banging out anything from Chuck Berry to Little Richard to Eddie Cochran.
Then again, that didn’t have to be limited to just steady rock and roll. There were just as many moments where they tried their hand at strange detours like ‘Besame Mucho’, but out of all the tunes they played live, girl groups tended to go over just as much as the uptempo rockers, leading to them throwing in pieces of The Shirelles catalogue into the set.
After all, if they had to play for eight hours every night when they were in Hamburg, it was probably a good idea to build up a huge repertoire no matter if girls sang them or not. Though Ringo Starr would use ‘Boys’ as his vocal showcase on their debut Please Please Me, McCartney said that there was at least a little bit of trepidation going into performing it for the first time.
Since the piece was meant to be sung by a woman, McCartney felt a little strange about recording the tune, saying, “Ringo always used to do a song in the show. Back then, he had ‘Boys’. It was a little embarrassing because it went, ‘I’m talking about boys – yeah, yeah – boys’. But we never thought we should call it ‘Girls’, just because Ringo was a boy. We just sang it the way they’d sung it and never considered any implications.”
If people were to have had a problem with them not flipping the genders, hardly anyone even cared. What was more important was the energy they were creating whenever they played, and from the moment that the song starts on Please Please Me, hearing Starr rock along with the rest of the band is pure ecstasy, especially when the solo comes up and you hear him hand it over to George Harrison.
Even though The Beatles were shaking in their boots when they recorded for the first time, not flipping the gender hardly got in the way of them. Half of their covers included a few detours like ‘Anna (Go To Him)’ and the cover of the Broadway tune ‘A Taste of Honey’, so what’s the problem with a little bit of doo-wop thrown in?
Besides, if the album didn’t include ‘Boys’, we probably wouldn’t have been introduced to Starr’s voice alongside the rest of the Fabs. It might not have the most resonance, and he might even tell you that he’s not the greatest singer, but what he doesn’t have in vocal chops, he makes up for with absolute charm whenever he’s got the mic.
