Yeah, yeah, yeah!

(I wrote this three years ago, as part of a never-completed course on web writing. Because of my next blog post, it seems relevant to reproduce it now.)

George Martin was the record producer for The Beatles and an expert in turning ordinary songs into hits. If you think students’ attention is wayward and difficult to hold, especially through distance learning materials, think about how much more fickle and hard to win is the devotion of pop fans. One of Martin’s producer tricks can also be used in the writing of distance learning materials – thus showing that we can always learn something from a master, even if their craft is apparently unrelated to our own.

In early 1963, the Beatles had their first number one single with “Please Please Me”. They followed it up with an album of the same name, which at Martin’s insistence was filled out not with the usual hurriedly-arranged covers of pop standards but a selection of their own songs with which they were electrifying live audiences. The strategy paid off, and the album quickly began to repeat the success of the single. So when the Beatles arrived at Abbey Road studios that summer to record their next single, it was a critical moment. Expectations were enormous, and if they failed to meet them they could become like the many other bands which never sustained their early promise.

John and Paul got out their acoustic guitars and played George Martin their new song, which they’d knocked up in their hotel room a few nights before. It can’t have sounded much like a song which would set the world on fire. The tune wasn’t especially catchy, and the words were no less banal than those of most pop songs. The ending, Martin thought, was downright corny. But what he noticed was that the chorus was strong: in fact, the chorus was very good indeed. His suggestion was that instead of starting in the usual way with the first verse, they should start with the chorus and bang it out really loud. That way they might just create enough momentum to save the song. Maybe.

That song, when it was released as a single, had the fastest sales of any record in the UK up to that time, and it remained the best-selling record in the UK until 1978. It became synonymous with the Beatles: it was the early Beatles sound. And it was all down to that opening chorus, which as George Martin had spotted was by far the best bit of the song:

She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, YEAH!

Who remembers the rest? (You could never hear it anyway, in their live performances, because the girls were screaming so loud.) The verse gives the song body and substance, but it’s not what sells the song to us, then or now. By opening with the chorus, it starts on a high: the pace and excitement is there from the first bar. We know right away that this is going to be a great song.

So what’s your yeah, yeah, yeah? In the learning materials you’re writing, what’s the thing which is going to get your students excited and make them glad they’re doing your course?

The George Martin trick is to put that thing up front. Don’t make your students wait; let them know right away how good your song is going to be.

Sources

Philip Norman, Shout! The True Story of the Beatles (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981), pp 177-8.

Wikipedia, ‘She Loves You’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_Loves_You (accessed 24 August 2010)