5. P.S. I Love You

“The story of “How Do You Do It?” is important for understanding how they ended up re-recording “P.S. I Love You” for the single.”

From 1957 to 1960, John and Paul were active songwriters. A few of the songs they created – or started creating – in those years went on to be part of the core Beatles output for EMI: “Love Me Do”, “I Call Your Name”, “I’ll Follow the Sun”, “What Goes On”, “One After 909”, “When I’m 64”, and “Michelle”. Some other songs from that era have been released on subsequent Beatles releases starting in 1994: “In Spite of All the Danger”, “Cayenne”, “You’ll Be Mine”, “Hello Little Girl”, “Like Dreamers Do”, and “I’ll Be On My Way”.

{extract of “I’ll Be On My Way”}

A couple appear briefly on the Fly on the Wall CD that accompanied the initial release of Let It Be … Naked: “Fancy Me Chances With You”

{extract of “Fancy Me Chances With You”}

and “Because I Know You Love Me So”.

{extract of “Because I Know You Love Me So”}

Some other early songs were played during the Get Back sessions but didn’t make it onto Fly on the Wall: “Thinking of Linking”, “Too Bad About Sorrows”, “Catswalk”, “Hot As Sun”, and “Just Fun”.

{extract of “Just Fun”}

“Thinking of Linking” was also done by the Threetles during their acoustic jam in 1994.

{extract of “Thinking of Linking”}

Apart from these, there were some other early songs that were released by artists other than The Beatles: Cilla Black had a minor hit with “Love of the Loved” and Peter and Gordon had a huge hit with “World Without Love”, much of which was written when Paul was 16 years old (Miles 1997).

{extract of “World Without Love”}

And in 1991, Paul released his unplugged version of “I Lost My Little Girl”.

There are also a few other early songs that we know of that were never taped. {extract of “I Lost My Little Girl”}

(https://earlybeatlessongs.weebly.com/)

So they wrote quite a few songs in those early days, up to 1960. Given all that productivity, what happened next is quite surprising. In 1961 they almost completely stopped writing new songs. After they returned from their first trip to Hamburg at the end of 1960, they leapt to the top of the music scene in Liverpool, and they got very busy with playing gigs, sometimes two or three per day. In these gigs, they were basically a covers band. They had no confidence that their original songs were up to the standard of the great American music that dominated their sets, so they hardly played any original songs. Given all that, you can understand why they might have thought it wasn’t worth writing new songs. Plus, they were too busy playing gigs to have time for writing. So perhaps it’s not so surprising after all that they stopped writing songs. The only new song that we know for sure that they wrote in 1961 was the instrumental “Cry for a Shadow”, written by George and John and released on the various Tony Sheridan albums.

{extract of “Cry for a Shadow}

But then, Brian Epstein took on their management near the end of 1961. Brian first saw them as a covers band but he soon learnt that they had written some original songs. He was excited by this as it gave them a point of distinction that he thought would help in his efforts to get a record company interested (Lewisohn 2013). At his prompting, they started to include a few of their old originals in their set. They did “Hello Little Girl” from 1957, “Like Dreamers Do” from 1959 and “Love of the Loved” from 1959.

{extract of Decca version of “Love of the Loved”}

Brian’s excitement about their original songs didn’t immediately trigger them to write new ones. For a while, they just played these three oldies, including at the failed audition for Decca on 1 January 1962.

It wasn’t until 22 March 1962 that Paul wrote his first new song in over a year, “Pinwheel Twist”. There is a strong consensus amongst those who heard it that this song was a stinker. Paul himself later said he was embarrassed about it. Shortly after that, John followed up by writing “Ask Me Why”, with some help from Paul. This is a much better song – one of the stronger tracks on the Please Please Me album – and it went into their live set.

{extract of “Ask Me Why” from Star Club}

Then in May 1962, while they were in Hamburg, Brian telegrammed them to tell them that they had secured a recording session with EMI. Pete Best later remembered Brian’s telegram asking them to rehearse new material (Best and Doncaster 1985), but they seem to have taken it as a prompt to write new material. They started by reworking and updating Paul’s song “Love Me Do” from 1958, and then about a week after that (Lewisohn 2013), Paul came up with “P.S. I Love You”.

{extract of “P.S. I Love You”. “Keep all my love forever …”}

Songwriting

Some have suggested that “P.S. I Love You” is probably addressed to Paul’s girlfriend at the time, Dot Rhone. However, McCartney denies this.

“It's just an idea for a song really, a theme song based on a letter, like the Paperback Writer idea. It was pretty much mine. I don't think John had much of a hand in it. There are certain themes that are easier than others to hang a song on, and a letter is one of them. ... The letter is a popular theme and it's just my attempt at one of those. It's not based in reality, nor did I write it to my girlfriend from Hamburg, which some people think” (Miles 1997, p.38).

John confirmed that he contributed little or nothing to the writing of the song.

“That's Paul's song. He was trying to write a "Soldier Boy" like the Shirelles. He wrote that in Germany, or when we were going to and from Hamburg. I might have contributed something. I can't remember anything in particular. It was mainly his song” (Sheff 2020, p.193).

John was not clear about exactly where it was written, but Lewisohn (2013) says that Paul wrote it in Hamburg, in the rooms where they slept. He got testimony from an eyewitness to this effect, a young friend of The Beatles from Liverpool named Bernie Boyle. Bernie said that he was “mesmerised” watching The Beatles re-working “Love Me Do” and Paul writing “P.S. I Love You”.

Bernie said, “The feeling was that after the Decca rejection, this was another chance – and they were not going to bollocks it up again” (Lewisohn 2013, p. 1196).

Lewisohn (2013) observed that the opening line of “P.S. I Love You”

{extract from start of “P.S. I Love You”}

may have been lifted from a song by Pat Boone called “I’ll Be Home”.

{extract from “I’ll Be Home” starting at 0.57}

Paul certainly would have known that song as it was number 1 in the UK for five weeks in July 1956 (https://number1sblog.com/2018/05/26/47-ill-be-home-by-pat-boone/).

The Beatles rehearsed “P.S. I Love You”, along with “Love Me Do”, while they were there in Hamburg, preparing for the EMI recording session that was booked to happen soon after their return to England.

Music

The structure of “P.S. I Love You” follows the most common pattern that The Beatles used across all their songs: verses that include a hook, and middle eights, but no distinct chorus. Almost half their songs used this approach (Pannell 2023). In more detail, the song goes intro, verse, verse, middle eight, verse, middle eight, verse, outro. That’s quite a standard structure. However, there are some surprises built in.

In other episodes I’ve talked about The Beatles’ use of musical surprises – deviations from what our musical brain would expect to happen. Paul and John both included these sorts of surprises frequently. We are so familiar with the songs that we don’t consciously notice the surprises, but they are there, winking at our musical brains each time we hear them. It’s interesting that they occur even on their very first single. I wonder if John and Paul were conscious of doing this, or if it was just something they did naturally and intuitively.

The first one I’ll point out is that the intro and the middle eights are the same, but different. They have the same words, sung with the same timing, and the chords are similar, with one crucial difference, but the melodies and vocal harmonies are quite different. The intro goes,

{extract of intro}

while the middle eight goes

{extract of middle eight}

They sound so different that you might not realise how similar the chords are. For the first three lines, they both start with a G chord and end up on a D chord, but the difference is that in the intro, there is a C# chord in between. C# is just one semitone below D, and this makes it feel like the music is reaching up to the next chord.

{recording of guitar playing C#, D}

I can’t think of any other song by anybody where the intro consists of the entire middle eight but with different chords and melody. It’s really unusual.

The next surprise is in the chords of the verse. The song is in the key of D, so the inclusion of chords like Em (the 2 chord), A (the 5 chord), and Bm (the 6 chord) is no surprise, but then it jumps to B♭, the chord in between A and Bm!

{extract of transition to B♭}

Then, in the “you, you, you” part of the lyrics, it goes from B♭ to C, another unexpected chord, and back to D.

{extracts of the “you, you, you” part instrumentally and then with words}

The fact that the word “you” is emphasised over these chords that are out outside the main key of the song might make the word stand out. Perhaps this would make the listener feel even more that Paul is singing to them. We don’t know if this was Paul’s intention, but I can imagine that Paul knew intuitively that the musical surprises in this part of the song could be harnessed to emphasise that part of the lyrics.

There’s a video on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabpmbWfSPQ) that claims that “P.S. I Love You” was the very first song to use that chord sequence: flat 6th to flat 7th to the 1 chord. I don’t know if that’s true, but it is true that it has since been used in quite a few well-known songs, like “With a Little Help From My Friends”,

{extract of “With a Little Help From My Friends”}

“Lady Madonna”,

{extract of “Lady Madonna”}

“Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by Queen, “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath, and “Lola” by The Kinks.

{extract from “Lola”}

The next small surprise is the number of bars in each verse. Most popular music does things in multiples of four – many verses are four or eight bars long – but the verse to “P.S. I Love You” has 10 bars. It’s actually the insertion of that B♭, C, D chord sequence that stretches it out from eight to 10 bars.

A distinctive feature of the song is its unusual harmony vocal arrangement. In the verses, John and George chime in with harmonies for the first one or two beats of each bar in the first three verses. For example, they all sing “Treasure” and Paul sings “these few” and then they all sing “words” and Paul sings “’til we’re to-” and they all sing “-gether”.

{extract of vocals in verse}

To my ears, this is not as successful as many of their later vocal arrangements. It sounds a bit corny. On the plus side, the final verse has some variation from the earlier ones because John and George sing harmonies almost throughout, not just on some words.

{extract from final verse}

There are also nice three-part harmonies through most of the middle eights. I must admit, I don’t enjoy their exaggerated emoting in the second middle eight, where they sing extra bits in the gaps between the lines of lyrics. The most obvious is Paul singing “you know I want you to”, but there are a couple of other wordless bits as well.

{extract of “you know I want you to”}

The idea with these sorts of additions is that they are supposed to sound spontaneous as if the singer is carried away by emotion, but to me they don’t sound convincing in this recording. To be fair, they were still learning how to perform in the studio.

Back to the intro, we hear Paul and John singing in unison. This is a strategy they used in a number of their songs, especially in the earlier years. It’s amazing how well their two different voices meld together. At the end of the intro, John does an unusually low harmony. It doesn’t stand out in the final mix, but you can hear it in the isolated tracks.

{extract of isolated vocals from intro}

It reminds me of the low harmonies they used in some of the songs they recorded with Tony Sheridan.

{extract from the introduction of “Why”}

This sounds nothing like the classic Beatle harmonies, apart from that one little bit of “P.S. I Love You”.

Instrumentally, the song is very simple. There are two guitars simply strumming the chords, the bass mostly playing root notes and fifth notes, and the drummer just tapping his hi-hat and the rim of the snare drum, plus maracas.

{extract of instruments}

There’s no solo, and there is no sophisticated interplay between the instruments, so the musical interest is mainly in the vocals.

Lyrics

The lyrics don’t have high aspirations. It’s just a simple, straightforward love song, in the form of a letter.

The intro and the two middle eights go

As I write this letter
Send my love to you
Remember that I’ll always
Be in love with you

I can’t help noticing a couple of problems. One of the most basic rules of songwriting is not to rhyme a word with itself. The Beatles rarely committed this sin, but in this case, Paul has rhymed “you” with “you”. “Send my love to you” with “Be in love with you”.

I say this was rare, but actually we saw another example of it in Episode 4, where Paul rhymed “met” with itself in the first verse of “I’ve Just Seen A Face”. I was relatively forgiving of that one, but it doesn’t seem as easy to overlook it in “P.S. I Love You”. This is making me wonder if it’s going to come up in other songs too, but if so, I’m sure it won’t be often.

There is also a problem with logic and timing. The recipient of the letter is being told to remember, as Paul writes the letter, that he will always be in love with her, but she can’t do that as he writes the letter because she won’t get the letter until some time later!

Even apart from those issues, it’s rather cliched, isn’t it? Despite them writing all those earlier songs that I mentioned at the start of the episode, Paul was still learning and maturing as a songwriter. But he learned quickly!

There are four verses in the song, but only two different verses of lyrics.

Treasure these few words ‘til we're together
Keep all my love forever
P.S. I Love You – you you you

‍ ‍

I'll be coming home again to you love
Until the day I do love
P.S. I Love You – you you you

A tough critic might argue that there is another self-rhyme in the second verse: “again to you, love” with “the day I do love”. However, "you" and "do" fall on the strong beat of the measure, so we probably hear them as the rhyme. 

For the third verse, he repeats the lyrics of the second verse, and for the fourth verse he repeats the first verse. They did sometimes repeat the first verse in later songs, but repeating the first and second verses was much rarer.

Recording process

The first recording of “P.S. I Love You” for EMI was on 6 June 1962, with Pete Best on Drums. This was their famous “audition” or Artist Test for EMI, although Mark Lewisohn later found the documentation that showed that it wasn’t really an audition because they were already under contract.

The way the contract came about is a fantastic story, and one that The Beatles themselves were completely unaware of. See Tune In by Mark Lewisohn (2013) for the whole fascinating story – every Beatles fan should read Tune In anyway –  but in summary, here is what happened. In the course of his efforts to get The Beatles a recording contract, Brian Epstein played a tape of their failed Decca audition to the EMI publishing company Ardmore and Beechwood. They liked the original songs and wanted to publish them, but Brian wouldn’t agree to that unless it came with a recording contract. Ardmore and Beechwood asked EMI to sign The Beatles, but they turned the band down. Ardmore and Beechwood kept asking, but EMI kept saying no. Some time later, it emerged that the head of EMI’s Parlophone label, George Martin, was having an affair with his secretary. His boss, L.G. Wood was highly offended that this had been happening under his nose. To express his displeasure at this, and some other grievances, he ordered George Martin to sign The Beatles. As well as sending a message to George, it also got Ardmore and Beechwood off his back.

After the fantastic sleuth work that Lewisohn did to reveal that amazing story, I find it surprising to read recently written accounts of the events that still say it was an audition. It must be extremely frustrating for Mark Lewisohn. It is interesting that in the updated Anthology video series from 2025, they stuck with the old, inaccurate version of the story, as recounted by George Martin. I guess they had to rely on interviews, and George was just repeating the story he had told many times, which he thought was true.

Anyway, by that strange and incredibly lucky route, The Beatles ended up at their first recording session for EMI on 6 June 1962. Before they could start recording, they had to deal with some limitations with the Beatles’ amplifiers. Engineer Norman Smith would recall, “They had such duff equipment, extremely noisy, with earth loops and goodness knows what. There was as much noise coming from the amps as there was from the instruments. Paul’s bass amp was particularly bad.” (Lewisohn 2013, p. 1224).

The problem of Paul’s noisy amp was fixed by technical engineer Ken Townsend. He and Norman Smith fetched a large speaker from an echo chamber elsewhere in the studio, and he soldered an input jack onto a Leak amplifier. We don’t know how the noise problems with John and George’s amps were fixed (Lewisohn 2013).

Having dealt with that, they recorded four songs: “Besame Mucho”, “Love Me Do”, “P.S. I Love You” and “Ask Me Why”, in that order. Lewisohn (1988, p.17) noted that, “although documentation no longer exists, each would have been done in about four or five takes”. However, Hammack (2023) includes specific numbers of takes for each song, so maybe documentation was found later. He says there were three takes of “P.S. I Love You”.

The tapes from this session were not kept by the studio but, remarkably, two of the recordings survived and have been released on Anthology 1 in 1995: “Besame Mucho” was found on a private reel of tape,

{extract of “Besame Mucho”}

and “Love Me Do” was on an acetate that somebody had kept.

{extract of Pete Best version of “Love Me Do”}

What really stands out in these recordings is Pete Best’s drumming. People have sometimes claimed that Pete was a good drummer, and implied that his sacking was unjust and unnecessary. For example, that’s the story put in the 2018 book, Finding the Fourth Beatle by Bedford and Popper (2018). But these recordings leave no doubt at all that it’s just not true. Even if George Martin had liked the songs, which he didn’t, he couldn’t possibly have released these recordings to the public, because of the drumming.

We have not yet been able to hear Pete Best playing on the EMI recording of “P.S. I Love You”. For a long time, that seemed impossible, because we were told that the tape was destroyed. However, in June 2020 it emerged that the tape with all four songs from the session had survived. In 1964 EMI employee Geoff Emerick had found it among rubbish that EMI had discarded, and he took it home and kept it.

The existence of this master tape became public knowledge because of a court case between Emerick’s family and Universal Music over the ownership of the tape. I haven’t been able to find out the result of the case, but the fact that “P.S. I Love You” and “Ask Me Why” were not included on Anthology 4 in 2025 suggests that Universal Music didn’t win or couldn’t reach a settlement that gave them the rights to the songs. We know what the recording engineer Norman Smith thought of them at the time, “it was twenty minutes of torture – they made a dreadful sound”, but I’d still love to hear the missing songs.

An incident at the end of this first session on June 6, 1962 was referred to repeatedly by George Martin and Norman Smith. It’s an important incident because it marks the beginnings of George Martin’s attraction to the group. Here’s Norman Smith’s version of the story.

“We gave them a long lecture about their equipment and what would have to be done about it if they were to become recording artists. They didn’t say a word back, not a word, they didn’t even nod their heads in agreement. When he finished, George said, ‘Look, I’ve laid into you for quite a time, you haven’t responded. Is there anything you don’t like?’ I remember they all looked at each other for a long time, shuffling their feet, then George Harrison took a long look at George and said, ‘Yeah, I don’t like your tie!’ That cracked the ice for us, and for the next 15-20 minutes they were just pure entertainment. When they left to go home, George and I just sat there saying ‘Phew! What do you think of that lot, then?’ I had tears running down my face” (Lewisohn 1988, p.17).

The poor quality of the first recordings meant that The Beatles had to go back to EMI for another attempt to record their first single. When they did so, on 4 September, Ringo had replaced Pete Best. “P.S. I Love You” was not one of the songs they recorded that day. Instead, they re-recorded “Love Me Do” and they did a new song, “How Do You Do It?”

{extract of “How Do You Do It”}

The story of “How Do You Do It?” is important for understanding how they ended up re-recording “P.S. I Love You” for the single. “How Do You Do It?” was written by a professional songwriter, Mitch Murray, and George Martin’s intention was that it would be the A-side of The Beatles’ first single. However, The Beatles strongly requested that it not be released as they found it too poppy and soulless. George Martin did not initially accept that request, but in the end his hand was forced. There were three factors contributing to this (Lewisohn 2013). Firstly, Ardmore and Beechwood, the EMI publishing company whose agitation had led to The Beatles’ contract, wanted to publish a Lennon and McCartney song on the A side, not the B side. Secondly, Dick James, who was trying to secure the publishing for “How Do You Do It?”, didn’t like The Beatles’ version of the song and didn’t think Mitch Murray would accept it being a B side. And thirdly, Mitch Murray totally agreed with Dick James and refused to allow The Beatles’ version to come out (Lewisohn 2013).

The process of recording “Love Me Do” in this second session was protracted and difficult. On the finished recording, the Beatle who sounds most like a weak link is Paul, as his voice is a bit wobbly and his bass is a bit out of tune.

But on the day it seems like Ringo copped most of the blame for the session not going smoothly, particularly from George Martin. Ringo seems to have got a bit muddled up trying to play drums and percussion at the same time, and George Martin was not impressed. This would have big ramifications a week later. It’s ironic because over their next seven years in the studio, Ringo was the most reliable and rock solid of any of them.

Eventually, at this September 4 session, a good enough version of “Love Me Do” was captured, and that is the version we can hear today on Past Masters Volume 1 and, interestingly, on the remixed Red Album. I guess it was included there as it is the only version with Ringo on drums.

Ardmore and Beechwood’s position meant that “Love Me Do” would have to be the A-side, which annoyed George Martin but pleased The Beatles. However, there was a problem because they still had no releasable recording that could be used for the B-side. So a week later on 11 September 1962 they came back to EMI for a third time specifically to record “P.S. I Love You” as the B-Side. I think it’s quite ironic that the song they chose to replace “How Do You Do It?” was even more poppy and soulless. “How Do You Do It?” is not a great song but, in my view, it is a better song and a better recording than “P.S. I Love You”.

On the plus side, the inclusion of “P.S. I Love You” on the B-side meant that every one of The Beatles’ singles included only original songs on both the A- and B-sides, at least in the UK. If “How Do You Do It?” had been released as the A-side and had been a hit, who knows what might have happened to The Beatles’ opportunity to record their own songs. George Martin might have lumbered them with a series of songs written by others. In many interviews he has made it clear that he didn’t think much of their songwriting at that point.

Mark Lewisohn (2013) says that at this third session, all the songs were recorded only on a single-track tape recorder. I wonder why the EMI team didn’t decide to record it to two-track, to give them some flexibility in balancing the vocals and instruments when they mixed it. That’s what they did for every recording after this, up to “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, when they switched to four-track. My friend Andrew Shakespeare suggests that they actually may have recorded it to two tracks and just mixed it to mono, but we don’t have firm evidence about that. If there ever was a two-track tape, it’s lost, and “Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You” are in mono on all The Beatles’ releases until the remixed “Love Me Do” on the Red Album from 2023, including on albums that are otherwise in stereo. Mark Lewisohn comments that “it seems they played everything live in the session, instruments and vocals together” (Lewisohn 2013, p.1336), and there were no overdubs.

‍This recording session for “P.S. I Love You” was produced by Ron Richards without George Martin in attendance (Hammack 2023). It was a momentous session for Ringo, and not in a good way. The second session, when they recorded “Love Me Do” and “How Do You Do It?”, had been Ringo’s first time in the studio, and although he was normally an extremely reliable drummer, the pressure of being recorded seems to have got to him and there were apparently a few problems with his playing, as I mentioned. To play it safe, Ron Richards hired experienced session drummer Andy White for the session on September 11, and Ringo was devastated. In some books, it is written that Andy White was hired to replace Pete Best, but actually he was hired to replace Ringo. Despite all the success and acclaim that followed, Ringo was still able many years later to tap into his feelings of misery and injustice that day.

It is also sometimes claimed that Andy White was brought in to play on “Love Me Do” (e.g., MacDonald 2008), and it’s true that he does play on the main released version of that song, but he was actually specifically hired to play on “P.S. I Love You”. His recording of “Love Me Do” was done opportunistically at the end of the session when they had some spare time.

There are some nice quotes from Andy White about that day.

“I had already heard of them because I was married to Lyn Cornell of the Vernons Girls, themselves a Liverpool group. They could have been cold towards me but in fact they were very nice, and kidded about. I was impressed because they were doing their own material, whereas most groups at the time were doing covers of American songs or Tin Pan Alley stuff.” (Andy White in Lewisohn 1988).

Here’s another longer quote from Andy White.

“I was working in London and doing a lot of TV. One Friday I got a call asking if I could do a three-hour job at EMI on the Monday.

That’s all I knew about it. I had heard of The Beatles by then because my first wife Lyn was from Liverpool and had mentioned the name, but I didn’t know much about them. But those guys were great, and I worked closely with John and Paul while we tried to get the routines all worked out. They hadn’t written anything down as music, so we just worked through it together.

They were great. Ringo and I didn’t have much between us, all my time was taken up learning the routines and he was playing the tambourines so he was only there for the take. I mostly spoke to John and Paul because they were the writers.

It was a really enjoyable experience, and what impressed me was they were doing some really good stuff, but it was all their own stuff and was really new. Everything else at the time was a copy of music from the States, which was very successful, but they were doing something new and you could tell it was something different and very special. But I didn’t know just how special it would become.” (The Daily Record 2012)

When Andy White died in 2015, despite his having played on hundreds of sessions for a long list of stars including Tom Jones, Herman’s Hermits and Lulu, his obituaries all focused on the day he was hired to play on a Beatles B side.

The session lasted from 5 to 6.45pm. The band recorded 10 takes of “P.S. I Love You”, then they did the version of “Please Please Me” that ended up on Anthology 1,

{extract of “Please Please Me” Andy White version}

and these recordings went so smoothly that they had time to do another 18 takes of “Love Me Do”.

All of that was with Andy White on drums. Throughout “P.S. I Love You”, he doesn’t hit the snare drum, but instead taps the rim of the snare with the side of his drumstick. Apart from that, I can hear high-hat throughout the song, but nothing else from the drums. No bass drum, no toms, and no hits on the skin of the snare drum.

{extract of drums}

It’s such an incredibly simple drum part, it must have seemed completely ludicrous to Ringo that the producers had hired in someone else to do it. Some sources say that Andy White played bongos, but that’s obviously not correct. Ringo stood near the drums and played maracas, although it’s hard to hear them in the mix.

The last take, take 10, was chosen as the best one. There was no opportunity to mix the song as it was recorded in mono, and that brings me to my final gripe about the released track: one of the guitars – I think it’s John’s – is a bit out of tune on the top string.

{extract of guitars}

It would have sounded better if the guitar was a bit lower in the mix, but there was no way to make it quieter once the recording was down because everything was recorded on the same track.

I’ve been a bit critical of a few aspects of this song: its lyrics, its arrangement and its tuning. But I think it’s completely understandable that such a young band with so little studio experience would have some misfires in their early efforts. This is not their only misfire, and I don’t think it’s their worst song. Looking on the positive side, these few early dodgy songs do have the merit that they make the towering genius of their best work seem even more astounding. It also highlights how rapidly their songs and their recordings improved from this point forward.

Instruments

On “P.S. I Love You”, like all their earliest songs, Paul played his first Hofner 500/1 bass – one of his famous violin-shaped basses. This is the one he bought from the Steinway music store in Hamburg in 1961 for 287 Deutchmarks – about £25 or US$70 at the time (Babiuk 2015). He had to order it in specially to get a left-handed model. One of the reasons for choosing a Hofner bass is that it was cheap.

Paul said, “I couldn’t afford a Fender. Fenders, even then, seemed to be about £100. All I could afford really was about £30. [I was] always teetering on the edge of not having much, so I didn’t really want to spend that much. So … I found this Hofner violin bass” (Babiuk 2015, p. 76).

It turned out to be a great choice. It had a highly distinctive look which became associated with The Beatles. It sounded good when recorded. It was light on Paul’s shoulders. And it was a short-scale bass, which made the transition from guitar to bass a bit easier.

This is the famous bass that was stolen out of the back of a Wings touring truck in 1972 and wasn’t rediscovered until 52 years later, in 2024.

At the September 11 session, John played a brand new guitar that he had only taken possession of during the previous week, possibly even the previous day (Babiuk 2015). He and George had both ordered in Gibson J-160E acoustic guitars from the US earlier in the year, through Rushworth’s music store in Liverpool. These were expensive guitars for the time, at £161 each. They are unusual as acoustic guitars because they include an electric-guitar-style P90 pickup. It is the same type of pickup as used in some Gibson Les Paul guitars, and in Epiphone Casinos, which became workhorse guitars for The Beatles in later years.

This explains something about “P.S. I Love You” that puzzled me for a long time. Mark Lewisohn (2013) said in Tune In that John played his Gibson acoustic plugged into an amp. My problem was that I didn’t think it sounded like an acoustic guitar. I expected to hear something similar to a modern acoustic guitar pickup, not realising that the pickup was a P90. Now it makes perfect sense. It certainly doesn’t sound like John’s Rickenbacker 325 Capri, which would be the obvious alternative.

The identity of George’s guitar is less clear-cut, because it is quite hard to hear in the mix, but on balance I think he’s probably playing his Gibson J-160E as well. A number of sources agree with that (e.g., Dowlding 1989; Rybaczewski undated), but not all. Lewisohn (2013) says it was his Gretsch electric guitar, which at that stage was a model called a Duo Jet, but listening to the isolated guitar parts on YouTube, the two guitars sound similar in tone. Mattiboo on his YouTube channel demonstrates the two guitar parts both played on Gibson J-160Es plugged in, and it sounds right to me. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amSI8xjm4EY)

Jerry Hammack (2023) in his Beatles Recording Reference Manual has a bet each way. First he says John and George played their Rickenbacker and Gretsch electric guitars, but later in the book he says there is photographic evidence that “the Gibson J-160E acoustic guitars were run through the Vox amplifiers for the recording of ‘P.S. I Love You’” (Hammack 2023, p.244).

In September 1962, Ringo had not yet started using Ludwig drums. He was still using a Premier kit that he had purchased in 1961, while he was still playing with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He traded this kit in for his first Ludwig kit in 1963. After it was sold, the Premier kit made its way to Perth, Western Australia, but it is now lost. I imagine that someone eventually threw out a ratty old kit, without realising that it had been Ringo’s and could be worth millions.

Versions and mixes

At some stage in the process, it appears that there was discussion about the possibility of making “P.S. I Love You” the single A-side, but Ron Richards ruled that out. “I was originally a music publishing man, a plugger, so I knew someone had done a record with that title. I said to Paul, ‘You can have it as B-side, but not an A-side.’” Richards was referring to a 1934 song written by Gordon Jenkins and Johnny Mercer, which was completely different from the Beatles’ song, other than being in the form of a letter. This old song was originally recorded by Rudy Vallée in 1934,

{extract of P.S. I Love You by Rudy Vallee}

but later also recorded by Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and others. Elvis Costello performed it live with the Brodsky Quartet in 2009 and Bob Dylan did a nice but croaky cover of it in 2017, on his Triplicate album.

{extract of P.S. I Love You by Bob Dylan}

Of course Ron Richards didn’t need this excuse to say that “P.S. I Love You” should not be the A-side. He could just have said that it wasn’t as strong a song as “Love Me Do”, which was true.

If he did feel he needed that rationale to exclude it from the A-side, then it’s pretty ironic, because there was also another song called “Love Me Do”, also utterly different from the Beatles’ song. Two versions of that “Love Me Do” had been released in 1957, just five years earlier, by Danny Kaye and Matt Monro, and the Matt Monro one was even released on Parlophone.

{extract of “Love Me Do” by Matt Monroe}

Apparently Ron Richards didn’t know that, or had forgotten it, or thought that song wasn’t well-known enough to matter. In Tune In, Mark Lewisohn speculates that Paul may have seen an ad for that older “Love Me Do” in NME and grabbed the title for his 1958-written song from there.

“P.S. I Love You” was first released in the U.K. on 5 October 1962 as the B-Side of “Love Me Do”. As I’ve said, on this release, and on every subsequent release, it was only available in mono.

The single made it to a relatively low number 17 on the chart published by Record Retailer, which is the chart that is usually quoted. Number 17 doesn’t sound like much, but actually it was a fantastic achievement for a new band with their debut single, especially a new band from Liverpool, and especially since EMI gave it minimal promotional support. That lack of support was a result of George Martin having no confidence in the single, but he under-estimated the appeal of “Love Me Do” and the determination and persistence of Brian Epstein and of the songs’ publisher, Ardmore and Beechwood. I’ll leave that story until we get to the episode about “Love Me Do”.

Its moderate chart success was sufficient to get The Beatles into the British music press, and to make George Martin have a re-think about his attitude to the band doing original songs.

Other than in the U.K., the release of “P.S. I Love You” was quite complex and a bit chaotic.

Capitol refused to release the single in the U.S., as they obstinately and foolishly refused to release anything by The Beatles until their fifth single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”.

“Love Me Do” backed with “P.S. I Love You” was released as a single in Canada on 18 February 1963, and it eventually made it into the top 10 there (https://chumtribute.com/64-03-23-chart.jpg). That chart position was in March 1964, on the coattails of general Beatlemania.

“Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You” were first released in the US on 10 January 1964 on the album Introducing The Beatles, put out by the Vee-Jay label. Vee-Jay had managed to acquire the rights to the Beatles early songs up to “From Me To You” following Capitol’s complete disinterest. However, this was a very short-lived release, as the American publisher of these two songs, Beechwood Music Inc., objected to their release in this way, and served Vee-Jay with a restraining order. Vee-Jay removed them from later pressings of the album and replaced them with “Please Please Me” and “Ask Me Why”.

Following the scarcely believable success of The Beatles in the US in the first part of 1964, “Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You” were eventually released as a single on 27 April 1964, on an obscure label called Tollie, which was actually a newly-created subsidiary of Vee-Jay. By this point, The Beatles were so popular that almost anything released with their name on it was a hit. Having said that, not everything they released made it to number 1, but “Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You” did, making it one of six number 1 singles for them that year. Actually, “P.S. I Love You” charted separately from “Love Me Do”, and made it to number 10 in its own right. It was the first of five Beatles singles for which both sides made the top 10.

Vee-Jay’s license to distribute a number of Beatles tracks in the US expired in October 1964, and Capitol was able to get control of all the songs that they had originally turned down. A most undeserved victory! As a result, “P.S. I Love You” was finally released by Capitol as part of the album called The Early Beatles, on 22 March 1965. This is almost 2.5 years after they were first offered it. Because everyone except brand-new Beatles fans already had all the tracks, that album only made it to number 43.

I’m not going to go through all the different countries that released “P.S. I Love You”, but I will mention Australia, as that’s obviously of interest to me, and the story is a bit unusual. The first and for a long time the only release of “P.S. I Love You” was on the Please Please Me album, on 17 October 1963. This album was exactly the same as the U.K. version, but it came out seven months later. Still that was better than what happened in North America, and to their credit, the Australian label stuck with the English track list, rather than mangling it like the Americans did. Interestingly, “Love Me Do” was eventually released as a single in Australia another three months later, in January 1964, but without “P.S. I Love You” on the B side. Instead “I Saw Her Standing There” was used as the B-side. This is rather odd. All of the Beatles’ UK singles were released in Australia and they all had exactly the same B-sides as the British versions, apart from this one. I don’t know why it was changed. Perhaps somebody at EMI in Australia thought that “I Saw Her Standing There” would make a stronger B side.

Almost 20 years later, in July 1983, “P.S. I Love You” was released on a single in Australia for the first time. It was on a commemorative three-track 12” single, together with both versions of “Love Me Do”. This was a copy of a UK release from October 1982, which was put out to commemorate 20 years since the original release of the first single. But there is an important logical problem with releasing an exact copy of that single in Australia, because “P.S. I Love You” was not the original B-side of “Love Me Do” in Australia. Apparently, the people at EMI at that time didn’t realise that and didn’t bother to check. Also, the timing of the release in Australia was very odd. It was nine months after the anniversary of the original release in the U.K., and it was six months before the anniversary of the original release in Australia. Either way, releasing that record at that time in that place made no sense at all. Quite an embarrassing set of mistakes, really.

Live performances

“P.S. I Love You” went into The Beatles’ live set after the June 1962 recording session. We don’t know precisely how frequently it was played, as few set lists from this period have survived, but since they wanted to promote their single, it must have been played a fair few times. We do know it dropped out of their set in early 1963, and the fact that it wasn’t captured on the Star Club tapes at the end of 1962 suggests that it may not have been played frequently even by then.

In Tune In, Mark Lewisohn quotes a regular Cavern goer saying that the fans found it soppy and preferred The Beatles’ R&B covers, but were eventually won over. I don’t think it was ever really a fan favourite, or it would not have been dropped from their live set so quickly.

The fact that they never played it during the Get Back sessions it quite revealing, I think. During those sessions they played part or all of about 400 songs, including many of their very early songs. The omission of “P.S. I Love You” suggests that it wasn’t a favourite of The Beatles themselves either.

Paul McCartney revisited the song in the late 1980s, playing it live on the Flowers in the Dirt tour in a strange mash up with “Love Me Do”, called “P.S. Love Me Do”. You can hear this on the CD single of the live version of “Birthday”, released in 1990, or see other performances on YouTube. In this version, Paul goes back and forth between the two songs and manages to make it sound not too clunky, but that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it.

{extract}

There is also an unreleased studio version dominated by 1980s dance rhythms which is even worse than the live version. Definitely a misstep by Paul.

TV, radio and movie performances

After The Beatles’ first single came out, they later recorded “P.S. I Love You” three times for BBC radio sessions, all of them with Ringo on drums. These versions appeared on the programmes “Here We Go” on 25 October 1962, “Talent Spot” on 27 November 1962 and “Pop Go The Beatles” on 17 June 1963. Of these three, it appears that only the last one has survived. I haven’t been able to find the first two even on bootlegs. The third one was released in 2013 on the second official compilation of BBC tracks, On Air – Live at the BBC Volume 2.

{extract from On Air}

That version is a pretty faithful reproduction of the original. The main differences I can hear are that it is a little bit faster, they include a different ending with a shift to a contrasting chord, and some of the vocals are out of tune. It does highlight that hiring Andy White for the original EMI session was completely unnecessary. Ringo does a fine job, and in fact he improvises a bit more than Andy White did.

Cover versions

Compared with the Beatles’ average, there are not many covers of “P.S. I Love You”.

George Martin recorded an easy-listening instrumental version on his album George Martin Scores. Quite a racy double entendre there for George. Unfortunately, it’s an insipid piece of muzak. It’s a little disconcerting to realise that it was created by the same man who wrote the scores for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Eleanor Rigby”.

{extract of George Martin version}

There is a nice version by The Smithereens on their 2008 album B-Sides The Beatles, on which they produced covers of a bunch of American single B-sides). This was a follow up to Meet The Smithereens, their recreation of Meet The Beatles the year before. Their version of “P.S. I Love You” is faithful to the original, right down to the detail of including the same drummer! Yes, that’s right, they invited Andy White to play on it, and he agreed. He plays it exactly like the original version from 46 years previously. It must have been an amazing buzz for The Smithereens to do this.

{extract of Smithereens version}

The Rattles are a German band that performed in Hamburg in the early 1960s, at the same time as The Beatles. They released a not-very-good version of “P.S. I Love You”, in which they get the chords wrong.

{extract of Rattles version}

Ronnie Spector first met The Beatles in London in early 1964, and again during The Beatles first US visit in February 1964. She provided a cover of “P.S. I Love You” for the Deluxe version of the McCartney tribute album called The Art of McCartney. It has a distinctly Phil Spector sound to it. It’s quite surprising that she would want or accept that, given how poorly Phil Spector treated her.

{extract of Ronnie Spector version}

Apart from that, Setlist.fm indicates that just a few artists have covered it live, including Tom Jones, Bonnie Tyler and Pete Best.

Conclusion

In The Beatles early history, “P.S. I Love You” is much more important than it’s usually given credit for. It is not one of The Beatles’ best songs, but it has a number of notable distinctions. Despite The Beatles spending a total of around 9 months in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, it is the only Lennon and McCartney song that they wrote in full while they were there. And it is one of only four songs they recorded for EMI with Pete Best as drummer. It was the first Beatles song to include an outside musician, although that wasn’t by their choice. It was the B-side of a number 1 single in the U.S. and a U.S. top ten song in its own right. And perhaps most importantly, along with “Love Me Do”, the release of “P.S. I Love You” marked the start of the greatest and most influential body of recorded popular music of all time.

That’s it for this episode. Let me know what you think in the comments on everysoundthereis.net, where you can also find the transcript. Join me next time on Every Sound There Is for another deep exploration of a Beatles song.

Theme music by Marcus Phelan with Stefan Koch. Music in the section announcements by Stefan Koch, David Pannell, Marcus Phelan; and from the Gimme Some Truth podcast, Obadiah Jones and his mixing engineer Liam Narrie. Voice-overs by Michael Burton.

References

Bedford, D. and Popper, G. (2018). Finding the Fourth Beatle, GBF, UK.

Best, P. and Doncaster, P. (1985). Beatle! The Pete Best Story, Plexus, London.

Lewisohn, M. (1988). The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Hamlyn, London.

Lewisohn, M. (2013). All These Years, Volume 1: Tune In, Extended Special Edition, Little, Brown, London.

MacDonald, I. (2008). Revolution in the Head, The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, Third Revised Edition, Vintage, London.

Miles, B. (1997). Paul McCartney, Many Years from Now, Henry Holt, New York.

Pannell, D.J. (2023). Quantitative analysis of the evolution of the Beatles’ releases for EMI, 1962 – 1970, The Journal of Beatles Studies, Spring/Autumn, 65-90. https://doi.org/10.3828/jbs.2023.5

Rybaczewski, D. (undated). “P.S. I Love You” History, Beatles Music History!, http://www.beatlesebooks.com/ps-i-love-you (accessed 16 March 2026).

Sheff, D. (2020). All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 40th Anniversary Edition, Pan, London.

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David Pannell

October 2026