Recording and UK Release
"I asked them for another song as good as 'Please Please Me,'" George Martin said, "and they brought me one — 'From Me to You.' . . . There seemed to be a bottomless well of songs."
The recording on 5 March 1963 at Abbey Road Studios went without a hitch and on 11 April Parlophone released "From Me to You" in the UK as a single, with "Thank You Girl" on the B-side, catalogue number R5015. Nine days later, it kicked off a twenty-one week run in the British charts, culminating with reaching number one on 4 May, a position it would retain for seven weeks.
"From Me to You" featured Lennon playing harmonica in a Jimmy Reed-inspired blues style he had learned from Delbert McClinton, another American who was on the same bill with the Beatles in the early Sixties. "It's chiseled in stone now that I taught Lennon how to play harmonica," McClinton said. "John said, 'Show me something.' I was in a pretty unique position, because there just weren't a lot of people playing harmonica in popular music."
"From Me to You" was the first Beatles song to reach number one in Britain and is widely considered to be their first chart-topping song, for although "Please Please Me" reached the summit on almost every chart, it was only number two on Record Retailer's chart, generally considered to be the most authoritative for the time. "From Me to You" would be the first of eleven consecutive British number one singles by the Beatles.
"From Me to You" replaced Gerry & The Pacemakers' "How Do You Do It", a song that had been offered to the Beatles (and even recorded by them, though it remained officially unreleased until 1995) but ultimately rejected by them in favour of "Love Me Do". Gerry & The Pacemakers, who also hailed from Liverpool, were very much rivals of the Beatles in their early days—Gerry & The Pacemakers attained the first number one ("How Do You Do It") before the Beatles, and also claimed their second and third number ones before the Beatles did, slowly losing steam afterwards as Beatlemania launched and the Beatles dominated music worldwide in 1964.
A true indication of how successful the Beatles became thanks to "From Me to You" (though it would soon be overshadowed by "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand") was expressed by McCartney: "The first time I thought we'd really made it, was when I was lying in bed one morning, and I heard a milkman whistling 'From Me to You'. Actually, I'm sure that I once heard a bird whistling it as well. I swear I did!"
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