22 november 1963
My friend Mark Lewisohn, currently at work on the second volume of his majestic history of the Beatles, broke off from his labours to remind me that today is the 60th anniversary of the UK release of the group’s second LP, an event whose significance might be hard to convey to those who weren’t around at the time.
Within days of its appearance on 22 November 1963, with the beatles was a presence in just about every home in the land containing one or more teenagers, irrespective of social class. For a pop record, that universality was a first. It also arrived just in time for Christmas parties, at which it became a fixture, whether in stately homes or council houses. In my memory, it represents the moment that sealed their acceptance as something much more than just the latest chart sensation.
Unlike Please Please Me, its predecessor, with the beatles was not conceived as a couple of hit singles plus a dozen other assorted tracks. It was a proper album: a package of 14 tracks that sold itself on its own merits. Ignored were “From Me to You” and “She Loves You”, their No. 1s of the spring and summer, and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, which would come out a week later. That took some commercial nerve, and it paid off, with advance orders of a half a million.
The front cover, which made the album into a new kind of desirable object, is a story of its own. Robert Freeman, a 26-year-old Cambridge graduate who had been working for the new Sunday Times colour magazine, asked Brian Epstein to look at his photos of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz musicians. Once he’d been hired to shoot the cover image for the forthcoming album, the Beatles themselves showed him the moody black and white photos Astrid Kirchherr had taken of them in Hamburg. Freeman’s side-lit monochrome multiportrait of four young men holding coolly neutral expressions lifted the group out of the ingratiating banality of glossy publicity images, bringing echoes of French new wave cinema into the lives of young pop fans.
There’s another touch of the avant-garde in the use of all-lowercase sans-serif type for the title. Although by Christmas, like every other 16-year-old, I knew the whole album off by heart, it was years before I really noticed that the black letters had been subtly nudged out of strict alignment, as though they’re dancing.
thebluemoment.com 
I remember this coming out. Listening on repeat at my drummer cousin’s in south London. I never noticed the misalignment of title characters. Perhaps a portent – metaphorically speaking – of what was to come…?
My mum brought the record player into the kitchen so she could listen as well as me and my sister. If there was any need for proof that something very special was happening we had it in the first three tracks, but most of the album was top drawer and the sound much improved since Please Please Me only a few months earlier.
Although subsequently a Stones rather than a Beatles fan it is undeniable that right from ‘Love me do’ these musicians were something different and above the herd. This is proven by the legions of young devotees who weren’t even born when their music first aired.
A more uplifting reason to remember the very day John F Kennedy was assassinated.
Yes, Richard. Yes. Yes. It was magical.
Astonishing! 60th anniversary of “with the beatles” and JFK assassination. The crazy dialectics of the 60s. Nice point about the dancing letters.
Lovely piece. And I can’t believe I’d never noticed the dancing type before.
Such an impact. Never noticed the lettering. Will dig out the album
Thanks, Richard! I only saw them once. I got a train back to Manchester from Yorkshire with my girlfriend Lorna after a football game against Leeds or Sheffield Uni.The screaming of the fans was so loud that I was only able to recognise one the songs they played that night: Long Tall Sally.
I’d never known about the misalignment! Well spotted! I wasnt even conceived when this was released. Thank F**k my dad took me to Slough record centre when i was 5 and bought me the “Million Sellers” EP. I never looked back. They became my parents, and I’ve tried to live my life according to their principles ever since. This album is one of their great song books, showing their influences and their maturing song-writing. How we could do with them being around today. Now & then…..
This was the first album I ever had, purchased as my Christmas present by my parents – I would be ten years old at New Years Eve, the following week.
It is one of those albums that I played so much on the Dansette that I still can anticipate the tracks as they follow each other !
I followed the Fabs at every opportunity, but never saw them play live – the nearest I came was seeing John and Yoko when I attended the filming of the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus some years later.
I will listen again this weekend for sure…….
I think I wore mine out by January.
Less than 3 weeks after that Monday slot at the Royal Variety, when rattling jewellery left us twisting and shouting.
And the first chord on a piano, followed by “You know you made me cry-y”
Curious that the word ‘mono’ is in the same size font as the title.
I think this was a couple of years before stereo became the norm
The most noted significance of November 22, 1963 on the American side of the pond was of course the murder of President Kennedy (far eclipsing the passing of Aldous Huxley, but that’s another story). In any case, these same Beatles songs comprise the heart and soul of the soundtrack for America emerging from the JFK tragedy and into the fabled Sixties. The Beatles’ national television appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 sealed the deal. They were everywhere, welcomed more by us younger folk than many of our elders. Thereafter, the Beatles proceeded to redefine what constitutes popular music with every subsequent release. There’s a new very well-made 15-minute film released in conjunction with the latest last Beatles recording, bubbling with history, wit and nostalgia. Highly recommended.
6 decades on, never mind aeolian cadence – you hear that initial piano chord and you’re right back there:
“You know you made me cry-y”
Not only was I there .. I’m still here and still hooked
At the time, virtually every track was a blast .. none more so than the pronounced ‘aeolian cadence’ of Not A Second Time
An underrated song to be sure.
My life changed forever with the Beatles in 1963.
Like many others of a similar age, this 11 year old received the album as a Christmas gift (alongside The Shadows Greatest Hits !)
However, I was lucky enough to see the group ( the terminology “band” seemed to arrive much later) on November 30th at the Sunderland Empire theatre. The memory remains vivid….”fab”.
Having stared in wonder at the cover for months/years, I’m amazed I didn’t see the dancing letters. Is there no end to Fab Four trivia ?
We were children, so we loved them as a shift from Elvis and Cliff. And then we grew up – or some of us did. A chastening thought that, had it not been for the BBC’s nativism and racism, and its ignoring of the wonderful music being issued on London American et al, we’d have been spared the minstrelsy of “British beat” and “British R&B”.
But Geoff, you’ll have to explain to me how, by 1962, I was already tuned in to Muddy Waters, Fats Domino, the Miracles, Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs, the Shirelles etc and yet still loved the Beatles.
Because you listened to short wave radio perhaps (?) Not the World Service though, where you got to know Muddy Waters?
We had a jazz society at school, and an older boy had a copy of ‘Muddy Waters at Newport’.
I can’t explain, Richard – it’s just the erratic nature of genius!
The good stuff came out eventually in the end, the spark had come out of NOLA, much earlier. Yes l was 11, and got hooked ever since.
Having started work admittedly as a very poorly paid articled clerk to a solicitor only two months before this was the first Lp I could afford to buy on release but I was blessed as there was a music store on the ground floor of the building where our office was situated. Of course JFK’s assassination was the major event of the weekend but it was also the weekend Dr Who was first broadcast. I also remember the record at parties that Yuletide.
I’m fully in agreement with every one of Stephen Donovan’s comments
The dancing letters – how extraordinary. Only now have I seen this effect, 60 years later, on my birthday month. I do remember that the only records played at Kentish Times staff parties that holiday season, were by…The Beatles.
The title was not carried over into the early albums in the States – Meet the Beatles (Capitol) and Introducing the Beatles (Vee Jay). The latter, according to one web account, was released 10 days before to the former, at least in the US. If memory serves me correctly both featured I Saw Her Standing There, though as I recall the counting at the inception of the song started with “4” in the Vee Jay iteration.
Memory plays tricks. I was a teenager at school, and this record (and the Rolling Stones’ first EP – with ‘You Better Move On’) formed such an integral backdrop to that term that I always assumed it must have been released in October, rather than the last few weeks before Christmas.
I’m pleased to say I still have the mono LP and it’s just about playable.
A beautiful cover for a beautiful record.
The ‘bopping’ letters set in Grotesque No. 66 (designed by Stephenson Blake) had appeared prior to With The Beatles on the Please Please Me LP as the mono and stereo idents (handily placed upper top right so you could easily find your preferred format flicking through the racks).
Robert Freeman smartly recognised the intrinsic Joie de Vivre in the letterforms breaking their formal boundaries and embraced this as a visual signifier for the youthquake shaking the staid, front-parlour fustiness of post-war Britain.
Thank you, Mr Mousdale, for that excellent and much appreciated typographical information.
Thank you, Richard. It was an absolute pleasure to celebrate this fab gear platter!
Great post, Richard!
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