The Beatles first single (#17 in UK, Dec '62, #1 in in USA '64 - what a difference fame makes).

It's well known the group had a hard time at first getting a recording contract, and were rejected by all major London studios until the little known EMI subsidiary Parlaphone decided to take a chance - indisputably the most spectacular A&R scouting coup in pop music history.

Why the knockbacks? They wanted to record their own songs and they were told their lyrics were crap. Here's the proof - a page torn from Paul McCartney's schoolbook. It's the first draft of 'Love me do' and was found wrapped around a piece of three-day old cod in a garbage bin behind the Cavern Club in the autumn of 62 by an unemployed (and hungry) Liverpool dockland worker. The cod has been long excreted but this priceless artifact of Britpop lyric history remains. And the words smell as bad as the paper. Exclusive to Amiright, it's now out in the open air. Hold your noses and salute musical posterity.

Fortunately for us, Paul took the studio criticism to heart and revised the lyrics, and as we all know, did WONDERS with it. The groundbreaking recorded version is ripe with verbs in the imperative mood, quantifiers, at least one indefinite adverb of frequency, an accessible simple-sentence comparative, and an effortless rhyming structure, while subtly imploring the protagonist's object of affection to consider a heartfelt reciprocity with convincing conviction. Naturally there were a few spelling errors. but with artists like this we take those 'as read'. Even in these early days, one can sense the potential of the articulate literary opuses to come - 'She loves you', 'I want to hold your hand', 'I saw her standing there', to name but three. No doubt an earnest young Minnesotan troubador named Robert Zimmerman was taking careful note ...

Trivia
*Producer George Martin, reluctant to waste precious studio time finding out if new drummer Ringo Starr was up to the task, employed session drummer Andy White, standard practice in those days but an action which rankled with Ringo for many years. Ringo plays tambourine on the better known session version, the only way of distinguishing it from the take with his own drum track.

*The chromatic harmonica used by John Lennon in the distinctive intro was stolen from a music shop in the Netherlands while en route to Hamburg. Lennon played in the prevailing pop style (he cites influences such as Bruce Channel's 'Hey Baby' and Frank Ifield's 'I remember you') and was almost certainly unaware at the time of the likes of Little Walter Jacobs and Junior Wells.