Unknown Performance of Love Me Do (1962)

BDJ's Cellar Full of Remixes

A three-minute sample from a tape auctioned in the '90s and purchased by the Beatles, featuring selections from various 1962 TV appearances has hit the Internet in December 2019. The samples consist of songs performed on October 17th, October 29th, and December 29th, 1962 — “Some Other Guy,” “Love Me Do,” A Taste of Honey,” and “Twist and Shout.”
As this performance went out live on TV, it wasn't taped at all. As luck would have it, the audio of these Beatles' appearances on Granada TV's People and Places were recorded by Adrian Killen, a 16-year-old fan from Kirkdale, on a reel to reel deck wired to the TV Speaker. It was sold at an auction and purchased by Apple for around £2000 per track.
Unfortunately, only brief samples are available, form the tape that was used to advertise the auction of the complete recordings. For instance, the Love Me Do sample lasts only 48 seconds.
Here, as a world premiere, we present a complete version of this Love Me Do as played on 17 October 1962. Love Me Do is highly repetitive, consisting of just 3 chords, and the verse is repeated four times! This enables us to re-constitute the complete song from the sample, with only minor fudging of the intro and outro.
The Love Me Do performance of 17 October is a revelation: not only was it the first Lennon-McCartney song to be played on television, it also differs from the version of Love Me Do on the single (and Please Please Me LP)! The difference is subtle, but it helps to resolve a mystery around the sacking of Pete Best as drummer. While the Beatles were rehearsing Love Me Do in Hamburg (with Pete Best on drums), Best made a suggestion for the arrangement: "The idea was to make the middle-eight different from the rest of the tune, and I said, 'OK, we put the skip beat in.'" The 'skip beat' was a fluctuation in tempo, an acceleration to lead into the vocal bridge and again later, before the instrumental middle-eight. It sounded good enough for John and Paul to accept. And when the Beatles went into the studio - with Pete Best - to record Love Me Do on June 6th, 1962, they included the skip beat (on Anthology 1). Later, the drumming of Pete Best was criticized, and the skip beat section was highlighted as being particularly poor. However, the critics do not consider that Lennon and McCartney accepted this skip beat in all performances until then.
Next, when Ringo recorded the song with the Beatles (September 4th, 1962), they did not play the 'skip beat', but added handclaps during the solo section to liven things up a bit. The version with Andy White on drums (September 11th, 1962) similarly omitted the skip beat, and featured Ringo on tambourine instead.
Therefore, it is amazing that Ringo played the skip beat on October 17th, just over a month after recording Love Me Do - without the skip beat. Apparently, Lennon, McCartney and Ringo didn't think it was such a bad idea (of Pete Best!) after all. This suggests that it was probably George Martin who objected to the skip beat, not Lennon or McCartney.
In subsequent TV and radio performances (recordings available after January 1963), Ringo never played the skip beat again! I suppose they wanted to remain consistent with the version out on the record.
So here we go, a truly unique live performance of Love Me Do!