| A Hard Day's Night marked a breakthrough as it was the first of their albums where every track was a Beatles' original. Personally, it was also a tour de force for John, who was the major contributor to 10 of the album's 13 tracks. Being the older in the group and the founder member of the Quarry Men, John was the unacknowledged leader in those days. Although Paul was more musically accomplished - he had mastered guitar and piano ahead of John - still they maintained the same junior pupil relationship that started when they met in 1957.
John later recognised that this was the period of his greatest dominance in the Beatles and it was only when, in his own words, that he became "self conscious and inhibited" that Paul became to take over. The majority of the groups singles up to this point, John claimed, had either been written by him, or featured him as lead vocalist. The only reason Paul sang on the track "A Hard Day's Night" was because John couldn't reach the high notes. Seven of the songs were written for the film A Hard Day's Night although one of these, "I'll Cry Instead", was eventually dropped in favour of "Can't Buy Me Love", a single which Paul had written under pressure. The Beatles were still writing pop songs to order but putting more of themselves into the lyrics. For example, "If I Fell" was one of the most revealing songs about John's troubled psyche. Equally, "And I Love Her" was one of Paul's most personal songs yet - a declaration of his love for Jane Asher. At the time, few people knew how or why the songs had been written. It wouldn't be until the Beatles broke up that the authorship of individual songs would be known and details, such as the marriage breakdown between John and Cynthia, would be revealed. At first, the film of A Hard Day's Night was conceived purely to sell a soundtrack album but, as with everything the Beatles touched in 1964, the film turned into a great commercial success, recouping its production costs almost 30 times over. The idea was to re-create the delirium of Beatlemania, charting the group's astonishing rise to fame in the style of a black and white television documentary. Little more than a vehicle for their musical talent, the Beatles were provided with undemanding acting roles and a strong supporting cast of character actors to cover any weakness. "I was with the Beatles in Paris when they played there in January 1964," says screenwriter Alun Owen. "I was also around them in an unofficial capacity on a lot of other occasions. The biggest nonsense that has been written about the film is that it was ad-libbed. It wasn't. They were at the time 22 or 23 year old. They had never acted before. If you go through the script, you'll see that no sentence is longer than six words, because they couldn't have handled any more. The only ad-libs were made by John." The Beatles were pleased with the final result. Although they knew it only showed one side of their personalities and wasn't as realistic as it could have been, they recognised that A Hard Day's Night avoided the clichés of most pop movies. The album was released in Britain in July 1964 and a month earlier in America, making the Number 1 spot in both countries. The American version was substantially different, featuring only the seven soundtrack songs and "I'll Cry Instead". It was made up to a 12-track album by including several of George Martin's orchestral versions of Lennon and McCartney's songs. |
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