I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party

Story Section status: Outdated

Recording

Equipment

Recording Timeline

• 29 September 1964 (Tue) — afternoon recording, takes 1–7, EMI Studio Two — Studio Two, 2.30–6.30pm. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ken Scott. Recording: Every Little Thing (takes 1–4), I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party (takes 1–7). The session split time between two songs; Every Little Thing came first, with take 4 deemed “best”, before work moved to I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party.¹
• 29 September 1964 (Tue) — evening recording, takes 8–19, completion, EMI Studio Two — Studio Two, 7.00–10.45pm. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Ken Scott/Mike Stone. Recording: I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party (takes 8–19), What You’re Doing (takes 1–7). “‘I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party’ was perfected in 19 takes, just five of those being complete run-throughs.” The evening block is credited to two tape operators rather than one, Mike Stone joining Ken Scott.¹
• 26 October 1964 (Mon) — mono mixing from take 19, Studio Two control room — Studio Two (control room only): 10.00am–12.45pm. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Tony Clark. Mono mixing: I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party (from take 19); part of a batch that also covered Rock And Roll Music, Words Of Love, Baby’s In Black (remix 2, from take 14), I’m A Loser and Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!.¹
• 4 November 1964 (Wed) — stereo mixing from take 19, Studio Two control room — Studio Two (control room only): 10.00am–1.00pm. P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Mike Stone. Stereo mixing: I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party (from take 19); part of a batch with I’m A Loser (from take 8), Words Of Love (from take 3) and Baby’s In Black (from take 14). Nine days separate this song’s mono from its stereo; the two were not always split that way, as with Every Little Thing, whose mono and stereo were both completed on 27 October.¹

Studio Notes

• The last STC microphone leaves the rhythm section — This song sits exactly on the finish line of a changeover that had been running all summer. The STC 4038 overhead had already gone in favour of an AKG D19c by the first Beatles for Sale date on 11 August; the bass drum was the last holdout. “By the group’s pair of September sessions (‘Every Little Thing’, ‘I Don’t Want To Spoil the Party’, ‘What You’re Doing’, ‘No Reply’), Smith had retired the STC4033-A on bass drum as well. In its place was an AKG D20.” The same model went onto Paul’s bass rig, “completing the move from all-STC rhythm section mics to all-AKG” — and the two were deliberately matched, because Norman Smith “preferred to have his bass drum and bass amp microphones match each other.”²
• Why the swap mattered to the compression — The D19c was “an inexpensive dynamic microphone”, and its attraction was not fidelity but rejection. Its tighter cardioid pattern, set against the figure-of-eight STC 4038 it replaced, “likely allowed Smith to compress the drums more heavily without simultaneously compressing — and therefore accentuating — the bass and electric guitar leakage.” On a four-track date where the whole rhythm section shares one track, leakage is not a nuisance to be tidied later — it is baked into the tape, and any compression applied to the drums lands on whatever else the drum microphones can hear.²
• REDD.51 console and its fixed outboard chain — Studio Two’s desk, installed in January 1964, was in its first year. The patching was not decided per song: “Main Faders I and II always had RS124 Altec compressors inserted; III and IV always used… Fairchild 660 limiters (after early 1964). This patching arrangement was directly tied to the four-track tape layout.” Rhythm material therefore arrived through the Altecs and vocal material through the Fairchilds, as a consequence of which track it was being sent to rather than of any choice made on the night.²
• The Fairchild 660 had stopped being an argument — The limiter that reached Abbey Road in 1964 was not welcomed at once. “By the time sessions for Beatles For Sale got underway, though, Norman had made his peace with the 660, and every session from that point forward made use of a pair of them, inserted into Main Channels III and IV of the REDD.51 desk.” A pair of 660s across the vocal channels is therefore the standing condition of this session rather than a decision taken for this song.²
• Nineteen takes, and only five of them finished — The song “was perfected in 19 takes, just five of those being complete run-throughs”, which leaves fourteen that broke down somewhere. The master is take 19: the last take of the night, with nothing cut back to an earlier attempt and no edit piece recorded afterwards. The contrast inside the same afternoon is sharp — Every Little Thing, taped immediately before it, had its ‘best’ at take four. What the session sheet does not record is why the breakdowns happened, and the book does not say.¹
• A second tape operator for the long block — The afternoon carries 2E: Ken Scott; the evening carries 2E: Ken Scott/Mike Stone. The paired credit is unusual enough to be worth noticing: in the whole of the published session log it appears on one page only — the run covering 29 and 30 September, 6 October and 8 October 1964 — and on each of the two-session days it is the second, longer block that carries both names while the afternoon carries Ken Scott alone. Mixing later split the roster further still: Tony Clark took the mono on 26 October and Mike Stone the stereo on 4 November.¹
• Amplifiers in their first autumn, and what is not on record — The 1964 equipment inventory moves John and George from “Vox A.C.50 Super Twin (2) (through July)” to “Vox A.C.100 Super DeLuxe (2) (August and on)”, so a 29 September date falls squarely in the new amplifiers’ first season. How they were taken on the night is a separate question, and the answer is that nobody wrote it down. The documented micing practice belongs to the rig they had replaced: at the 27 February 1964 session for If I Fell, John and George’s “new A.C.50 Super Twin rigs are mic’d with Neumann U47 microphones”. That is evidence about February and about the A.C.50, and it is left there.²
• U47s that were no longer quite U47s — “In early 1964, Abbey Road’s U47 microphones were modified (by Neumann in Berlin) to behave as U48s”, gaining the cardioid-and-figure-of-eight switching the U48 already had. The relabelling followed the capability: the labels were changed “by Neumann to reflect their new capabilities; instead of ‘U47’, their labels read ‘U47/8’ or ‘U47/48’.” By the autumn the two designations had become close to interchangeable in the studio’s own paperwork, which is worth knowing before reading any 1964 microphone list too literally — a sheet saying U47 and a sheet saying U48 may be describing the same object.²
• An album made between trains — The conditions were not ideal and nobody involved pretended otherwise. George Martin: the group “were rather war weary during Beatles For Sale” and had been “battered like mad throughout 1964, and much of 1963”. Paul put the record’s character more bluntly: “Basically it was our stage show, with some new songs.” Nineteen takes for one LP track, on a day that also had to produce two others, is what that schedule looks like from inside the control room.^1,2

Releases

• 1964 UK mono LP — Beatles for Sale (4 December 1964, Parlophone PMC 1240, side B track 5) — The attended mix, and the plainer of the two: no vocal cry ahead of the instrumental break, and the guitar further back in the balance than it sits in stereo.
• 1964 UK stereo LP — Beatles for Sale (4 December 1964, Parlophone PCS 3062, side B track 5) — The stereo carries a performance detail the mono does not: a cry of “woo” just before the instrumental break. The guitar is mixed louder here too.
• 1965 US single — Eight Days A Week / I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party (1965, Capitol 5371) — The song’s only issue as a single side in America, and it is the mono — no “woo”, quieter guitar. The release day is not pinned in the record, so the year alone is given.
• 1965 US LP — Beatles VI (1965, Capitol T-2358 mono / ST-2358 stereo) — America took both British mixes as they stood; no separate US mix was made. What changed was the company it kept, on the album that swept up what Beatles ’65 left behind.
• 1965 German single — Kansas City / I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party (June 1965, Odeon O 22-999) — A second single life on the Continent, under a different coupling from the American one — again the B-side, and again a British mix rather than a local remix.
• 1965 UK EP — Beatles For Sale (No. 2) (4 June 1965, Parlophone GEP 8938, side B) — The mono, on a four-track mono EP alongside I’ll Follow The Sun, Baby’s In Black and Words Of Love — for many British buyers the only way to own the song without the LP.
• 1987 CD — Beatles for Sale (EMI CDP 7 46438 2) — The first compact disc carries the mono, so the “woo” and the louder guitar were absent from the digital version for over twenty years — long enough for the mono to be what most CD-era listeners take the record to sound like.
• 2009 remasters — Beatles for Sale (Apple 82414 2) — The stereo reaches disc, remastered from the 1964 tape. To anyone who came to the song through the 1987 CD, this is the version that sounds altered: the cry arrives before the break, the guitar steps forward.