Critics tend to credit “I Saw Her Standing There” and “All My Loving” with setting off the initial blast of Beatlemania, but “Please Please Me” was the spark that lit its fuse. It was a rejection of all the sugarcoated pop that had clogged the British charts for more than five years. In its place, the Beatles had assembled fragments of their

whose aura probably set off car alarms up and down the hills.

Such experiments were hastened by Martin. “He’d come up with amazing technical things, slowing down the piano and things like that,” John recalled. “They were incredibly inquisitive about the recording process,” Martin recalled. “They wanted to know what they could do that people hadn’t [already] done.” A guideline was immediately established: no