GERRY AND THE PACEMAKERS – "How Do You Do It?"

The Beatles were offered this first and forced to record it under duress. They deliberately fouled it up (which must have taken some guts in the august space of Abbey Road), so it got handed to grinnin’ Gerry.

Unsurprisingly, this question has cropped up many a time in the history of Popular, so for you and any other Times-inspired newbies (a warm welcome, btw) here’s an explanation posted by Marcello Carlin in the “School’s Out” thread of all places:

“Since Record Retailer was the principal industry magazine its Top 50 was, strictly speaking, the official industry chart but the chart was never widely circulated outside the industry and was not used for practical purposes in the media, or indeed most of the industry itself – George Martin and the Beatles, for instance, have always regarded “Please Please Me” as their legitimate first number one.”

[So pop fans who were there at the time will remember it as a number one, but most sources you’ll find, from Guinness to the Official Charts Company, don’t have it down as such since they, and indeed Popular, use the Record Retailer list.]

“In the sixties there were four main singles charts – the NME, Melody Maker, Record Retailer and the BBC. The BBC one tended to be a compilation or reckoning of the other three – based on points IIRC, so you might not want to trust them too much – but the NME one was generally regarded as the definitive list since it had the greatest number of chart return shops and a weekly Friday-Thursday compilation schedule which corresponded with record release dates of the time, since singles in those days were released on Fridays rather than Mondays. This for instance is why Beatles singles didn’t tend to enter at number one in the Record Retailer list since they based their chart on a Monday-to-Saturday schedule – i.e. only two days’ sales for new releases. Also, the NME chart allowed EPs, so several of their number ones (e.g. 1965’s Kinda Kinks, lead track “Well Respected Man” which reportedly outsold everything else that year bar “Tears”) do not register in Guinness at all.

“Intriguingly, “Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane” did make number one in NME but everywhere else stayed second to Engelbert and thus that has passed into historical lore.

“By 1968 there was pressure, largely from the BBC as well as certain quarters of the industry, for the chart to be standardised, and the contract was won by BMRB with effect from February 1969. Most of the 350 chart return shops in Britain registered with BMRB, with the consequence that, although NME and MM continued with their own charts, they suffered a steep decrease in sources and so became less authoritative.”

Oh, and I refreshed the page while about to post this and saw the new design turn up like magic! Like it 🙂

#3 I wouldn’ have too starry-eyed a view of what Marcello says if I were you. I was there, before Marcello (or Tom or any of the others taking BRMB/Guinness as the last word on the subject) was born, and I definitely believe having been there trumps having heard it from some wannabe journalist who had to make do with hacking for the NME instead.

The definitive chart in 1963 was that announced at Sunday teatime by Alan Freeman on the BBC Light Programme, and I can reassure you that Please Please Me was indeed the first Beatles number one.

Marcello, of course, isn’t so rigorous about the BMRB chart as gospel when he’s obsessed with a perceived injustice done in 1976 to a well-known icon of the thick and untalented.

Are you trying to make a point, Tom?

Oh yeah – Rosie’s too thick and uncool to have anything worthwhile to say.

Rosie, please don’t go picking a fight now!! As I see it Marcello is carefully explaining WHY the Record Retailer chart, although it’s commonly used now as the authoritative list for UK number ones, doesn’t tally with the experience of those who were there at the time. It’s the clearest explanation I’ve seen and helped me understand the subject when I first asked him 2½ years ago – and now that one of our new readers picked up from that Times article has asked much the same question, it’s worth repeating.

In effect you’re vigorously agreeing with him – “Please Please Me” was number one in three out of the four charts in existence at the time, including the one you and millions of others saw as definitive, and it’s an accident of history that the odd chart out is the one whose archive subsequently became canonical.

You and I have both had our differences with MC before, but it’s in the past and deserves to stay there – please don’t let’s get personal again!

I don’t think everyone hangs on Marcello’s every word! Sometimes the conversation picks up on his posts, sometimes it flows around them – same as everyone else’s contributions. As Erithian says, his explanation was a clear one and quoting it saves everyone else the work.

If not being there is a reason to ignore an opinion, would you prefer I delete every entry pre-March 1973? 😉 Marcello is acting here as a historian – if he’s got a fact wrong, correct him, but I don’t think he has.

PS – while I’m always happy for a good argument on here, personal flaming isn’t on, so no more of the “tiresome old egotist” – especially as yr whole beef is he’s not old ENOUGH!!

It’s probably time to get this all sorted out. I’ve only just stumbled upon this article from the end of 2007 (shame on you DJP!) and it would indeed appear from the evidence presented that the Record Retailer list was the least important and least noticed of the various sixties singles charts. Balanced against this, however, is the inconvenient fact that no one set of charts could really be confirmed as “official”; the NME and MM lists (and the BBC compilation list) all had their faults but it would seem that these three were in the lead as far as both the public and the industry were concerned, with the NME chart being perhaps regarded as the most “important.”

I do agree, however, that inconsistencies continued well into the BMRB’s contract; in particular, if you look at the NME and BMRB album charts over the seventies they seem compiled from two entirely different sets of shops; the soundalike/K-Tel/TV-advertised records register in the NME chart but do not necessarily top them (or even go anywhere near the top) whereas NME-only number one albums included many important records; for instance in 1973 if I had been following the NME list I would have written directly about Dark Side Of The Moon as well as both red and blue Beatles albums. The options for me here as a number one album blogger are clearly to go insane and try and cover everything or just take the easy (Guinness) way.

Anyway, see what you think about the article:

http://www.davemcaleer.com/page21.htm

Yes great find DJP. Building on the questions, my comments in the 2nd para here are hazier and vague than I’d like. The “IIRC” preface applies to all of the 2nd para – but if I’ve made it all up, I’ve a more vivid imagination than ever I thought.

IIRC, at some point in the last year or so, I was listening to Paul Gambaccini’s fantastic Saturday night show. Gambaccini had cause to honour the Beatles “1” album, I think in his feature on the Top 100 selling albums of all time in the US (according to RIAA). He seemed genuinely contrite that “Please Please Me” hadn’t been included on “1” on the basis of a decision that he and his colleagues had made 35(ish) years previously; I think what made it worse for him was that the decision had been made of earlier editorial necessity rather than any strongly-held belief. I thought he came as close as possible to saying “we probably wouldn’t have made the same decision again today” without actually saying it, and I think there was still a sense pervading of “we had to go with one chart, not all of them”. (I also think he said he or Tim Rice had apologised to George Martin. That might have been in my dream that followed listening to the show, though.)

What puzzled me was how PPM would have fit on “1”. Isn’t it full-to-busting anyway?

I’m going to see if I can find any explanation made by one of Gambaccini, Rice, Rice, Read (GRRR), I’m intrigued too.

Funny, but FWIW I think if he and Read, Rice and Rice had been fairer back then, and referenced all the charts the book might have been a bit more niche, the book and the authors might have lost some of their authority and neither the authors nor the book would have gone on to be held in quite the high esteem that they were.

It also means that Elvis is ahead of the Beatles with regard to Number One Hit records.

There is quite a bit of mis-information here regarding Please Please Me and the Record Retailer chart. Marcello Carlin is mostly right in what he posted, but that is not the whole story. Record Retailer was not an industry chart when it started in 1960. Rather, it was a music paper/magazine of 30 independent record shops not tied to any record label, and that’s all it was. It never represented the full UK record industry, that is a falsehood put forward by the Official Charts Company decades after the fact to give weight to their erroneous decision in choosing Record Retailer to represent the 60s historical charts. Record Retailer was the least accurate chart of the 5 record charts of the 60s, it sampled the fewest number of record shops, disagreed with the other charts most often in terms of record peak position, was the most volatile in terms of record position movements, and basically no one followed it. Read this article by UK chart expert/historian/guru Alan Smith and find out the true story of 50s & 60s UK charts. Don’t believe the decades after the fact lie put out by the Official Charts Co. Their was no official chart before Feb 1969, and to choose the least accurate chart to represent the 60s is a travesty of historical justice.

Alan Smith: https://www.ukmix.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=103263

Not a bad single from Gerry and the boys imo. 6/10.