The Beatles – She Loves You

“She Loves You” – Single by the Beatles
B-side “I’ll Get You”
Released 23 August 1963 (UK), 16 September 1963 (US)
Label Parlophone (UK), Swan (US)
Songwriters Lennon–McCartney
Producer George Martin
Charted No.1 in US, No.1 in UK, No.1 in Sweden, No.1 in Canada, No.1 in Denmark, No.1 in Norway, No.7 in West Germany

The song with which Beatlemania truly began, ‘She Loves You’ was released as a single on 23 August 1963. It remains their best selling single in the UK.

The song was mostly written on 26 June 1963, in a room in the Turk’s Hotel in Newcastle, prior to The Beatles’ second performance at the city’s Majestic Ballroom. A true collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, ‘She Loves You’ distilled the essence of excitement in their music, and became a defining moment of their early career.

McCartney’s original idea was to have a call-and-response song, with him singing the title line and the others answering with “yeah, yeah, yeah”. Lennon, however, persuaded him otherwise.

This was an instant hit in the UK, but not in America, where it was released on Swan records, the only US label that would take it. Swan put it out in September 1963, but while The Beatles were huge in their homeland, they were still no big deal in America until February 1964. That’s when Beatlemania took hold and “She Loves You” became a US hit.

The single set and surpassed several sales records in the United Kingdom charts, and set a record in the United States as one of the five Beatles songs that held the top five positions in the charts simultaneously, on 4 April 1964. It remains the band’s best-selling single in the UK and was the top-selling single of the 1960s there by any artist.