The Beatles’ 1963 Revisited

Monday, July 1, 2013

IT'S JULY 1, 1963 AND at London's Abbey Road Studios a song is recorded that will change the world, the lit fuse of the most extraordinary pop culture explosion of the 20th Century. It's called She Loves You, the work of a Liverpudlian four-piece three singles (the last, From Me To You, their first UK Number 1) and one album old, not yet thoroughly Fab, but already pretty damn great. The Beatles' 1963, already manic in the extreme, is about to propel them into a mind-blowing transmogrification. By the end of the year they will be legends, aliens, avatars. Weird hardly describes it, but there were upsides, of sorts...

"We found girls hiding in the ceiling at Abbey Road," reveals Paul McCartney, revisiting Beatlemania in an exclusive interview in this month's MOJO. "We were recording and we heard some sort of noise. They eventually found out that high up in the ceiling there's maintenance ducts and there was a few fans who'd managed to get in there who were getting a bird's eye view of the session. So that was like, Oh boy."