Beatlemania Explodes!

The Beatles Mersey Sound 1963



"The Mersey Sound" was a one-off BBC special documentary profiling none other than the legendary 4-man band "The Beatles", and in this clip, well it shows The Beatles singing live a cover of the 1962 "Top Notes" song "Twist and Shout" to an audience of manic, screaming teenage girls, but not only that, fascinating coverage of the masses of people running and wanting to touch any one of the "Fab Four". Unbelieveable. 1963 was The Beatles at this stupendously stage of uber-popularity, reaching not only in their hometown of Liverpool and the UK, but reaching the far corners of the world, including breaking in America. Then we hear one of The Beatles (and Britain's) biggest ever single hits "She Loves You"...along with more hysteria. This live act footage was filmed at the Little Theatre, Houghton Street, Southport.

This documentary was originally shown on October 9th 1963, and was a 36 minute special, not only featuring The Beatles cast of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, but the film also covers 2 much lesser known rock/pop bands, "Group One" who were the opening act for The Beatles, and also "The Undertakers".

As regard to "The Beatles", Lennon and McCartney were the brains of the band, who plied their hand into writing all of their original songs such as "She Loves You". The Lennon/McCartney wrote a whopping 180 songs between the period of 1962 to 1969. However, they mostly worked by their own, writing the music and words, each song more relating to one rather than the two, however a double team effort was always needed to push that song as "all clear" for the band. They had been writing songs together since their teens. There is of course the infamous dispute of in the writing credits of whose name should come first! Naturally Lennon would come first, if in alphabetical order, but in the early days they would be reversed too, but this issue has angered John Lennon's wife Yoko Ono's wife after his death, as McCartney seemed to lean on having his name first on all the Beatles songs, and claiming it wouldn't have bothered Lennon in the first place. Although McCartney now says, he's over it, he still bloody does to this day...

The members of the band each had different roles of course, with McCartney on vocal, I can't say lead vocal, as Lennon was heavily involved with the singing too. McCartney would also be on bass guitar, Lennon on rhythm guitar, while George Harrison was the backing or harmony vocal with the lead guitar, and lastly Ringo on the drums, as we see on the clip.