He does it when they are squabbling, or when he thinks Merlin is being particularly stupid, or when he wants Merlin to do something for him and Merlin always flushes bright red and swats his hand away and Arthur finds himself doing it more frequently, without any particular reason, just because he likes the way Merlin blushes and squirms and looks quite simply adorable. Years later, Arthur still likes to pull Merlin's ears. Arthur looks shocked more than anything else, and then Hunith is there, sweeping the sobbing baby up in her arms, and scolds Arthur for bullying smaller children.Īrthur frowns and rubs his face with sand-covered hands, until his nanny comes running to lay into Hunith, telling her that the boy she just bawled out is Uther Pendragon's son, and this will have consequences, for certain.Īnd Hunith says some unflattering things about rich people, and arseholes in general, and hurries away, Merlin firmly enclosed in her arms.Īrthur wrinkles his nose, about to throw a fit because his new playfellow is taken away, but then Merlin turns around in his mother's arms and peaks over her shoulder, waving a shy goodbye with a tiny, chubby hand, and Arthur giggles and waves back.
Merlin stares at him for a second, lower lip trembling, and then he starts to cry. As Macca says, it is, after all, “very catchy”.The first time they meet, it's on the playground, when Arthur abandons his half-finished sandcastle to crawl over and pull Merlin's ear. Whoever the song was inspired by, it’s fair to say it had a large hand in helping the band get off the ground and help Beatlemania to sweep the globe.
So he cleverly speeded us up… and we put in the little scaled riff at the beginning, which was very catchy.” He thought it was too much of a dirge, and probably too like Orbison. I was always intrigued by the double use of the word ‘please.’ So it was a combination of Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison.”Įight years later and McCartney was happy to confirm the idea, saying: “It’s very Roy Orbison when you slow it down. And also I was always intrigued by the words of ‘Please Lend Your Ears To My Pleas,’ a Bing Crosby song. “I heard Roy Orbison doing ‘Only The Lonely’ or something. “I wrote it in the bedroom in my house at Menlove Avenue, which was my auntie’s place,” he added. It was my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song, would you believe it? While Martin’s influence on the song is upfront and clear, during his infamous Playboy interview in 1980, Lennon shared the song had some more direct inspiration too: “‘Please Please Me’ is my song completely. “We changed the tempo a little, we altered the words slightly, and we went over the idea of featuring the harmonica just as we’d done on ‘Love Me Do.’ By the time the session came around we were so happy with the result, we couldn’t get it recorded fast enough.”
In the following weeks we went over it again and again. We were getting tired though, and just couldn’t seem to get it right. In 1963 Lennon said of the song: “Our recording manager (George Martin) thought our arrangement was fussy, so we tried to make it simpler. A genius producer, Martin always pushed the band for more. You don’t get that live atmosphere of the crowd stomping on the beat with you, but it’s the nearest you can get to knowing what we sounded like before we became the ‘clever’ Beatles.”Īrriving equipped with songs is one thing but arriving with them perfectly arranged was never going to happen while George Martin was around. Lennon shares in 1963: “That record tried to capture us live, and was the nearest thing to what we might have sounded like to the audiences in Hamburg and Liverpool. Taken from the album of the same name, producers were keen to use the LP to show off the band’s intensity, the thing that had got them their album deal in the first place. There was one track which The Beatles used to fuse these two ideas together, that track was ‘Please, Please Me’.