Twist and Shout

(Medley/Russell)

Quick Facts

Lead Vocal	John
Recorded	Feb 1963
Length	2:32
Key	D
Noted Takes	2
Producer	George Martin
Engineer	Norman Smith

Originally released on

Please Please Me (LP)

Parlophone — PMC 1202

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"Twist and Shout" is a 1961 song written by Phil Medley and Bert Berns. It was originally recorded by The Top Notes, but it did not become a hit in the record charts until it was reworked by the Isley Brothers for their album Twist & Shout in 1962. The song has been covered by several artists, including the Beatles, Salt-N-Pepa, and Chaka Demus & Pliers, who experienced chart success with their versions.

Twist and Shout is a song by The Beatles, written by Medley–Russell and led on vocal by John. Album closer; cut last in one take with John's voice shredded by a cold. Within the catalogue, its cover thread connects it to Anna (Go to Him), Chains, Boys; its one-take thread connects it to Rock and Roll Music, Long Tall Sally; its vocal-shred thread connects it to Oh! Darling. Originally recorded by The Top Notes and a hit for Joey Dee and the Starliters in 1962, 'Twist and Shout' was recorded 11 February 1963 with John providing a raw, high-energy vocal that captured the song's rhythm-and-blues origins. The track's immediacy and Lennon's shouted phrasing became one of the group's most recognizable concert performances, establishing the song as a centerpiece of early Beatlemania live shows (Lewisohn 1988, p.27).

The session work falls within the band's Beatlemania (1962–1964) period, recorded 11 Feb 1963 at EMI Studios, Abbey Road. George Martin produced; Norman Smith engineered. For session-by-session detail, see Mark Lewisohn's account on p.11 of The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (excerpt below). Take 1 was selected for the album, a rarity suggesting either a first-take performance of exceptional quality or the decision to preserve the energy of an unrehearsed, spontaneous studio approach. John's vocal, delivered at full volume in the studio, likely strained his voice for subsequent takes; the decision to use the first attempt may reflect pragmatic engineering rather than accidental excellence. George Martin's sparse arrangement kept focus on the vocal and tight four-piece backing (Lewisohn 1988, p.27).

I did try a second take of ‘Twist And Shout’ but John’s voice had gone.— George Martin¹

What's distinctive

One of the canon’s 23 cover versions, led by John’s most famous vocal performance. Recorded approximately 13 of 67 into the Beatlemania (1962–1964) sessions. Carries the rare tag ‘vocal-shred’ — shared with only one other song. Take count: 2 — cut at the very end of the album-in-a-day marathon, take 1 the released master; take 2 was complete — not a false start — but John’s voice “had gone”, so there was no third.¹

Recording

The song was cut on Monday 11 February 1963 in Studio Two at EMI, at the very end of the day on which the Beatles recorded almost the whole of their first album. Three booked blocks — 10.00am–1.00pm, 2.30–6.00pm and 7.30–10.45pm — carried ten songs in less than ten hours, with George Martin producing, Norman Smith engineering and Richard Langham as second engineer throughout. The whole plan rested on one condition — “provided their voices could hold out” — and there “can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music”.¹
It was the last thing recorded. The evening block ran Hold Me Tight (takes 1–13), Anna (Go to Him) (takes 1–3), Boys (take 1), Chains (takes 1–4) and Baby It’s You (takes 1–3) before reaching this one, and the session sheet logs takes 1–2 against it. How it came to be the last song is on the record too. Norman Smith: “Someone suggested they do ‘Twist And Shout’, the old Isley Brothers’ number, with John taking the lead vocal.” By then “all their throats were tired and sore”, and John’s “in particular, was almost completely gone so we really had to get it right first time”.¹
There were two takes, not one, and the second one was finished. The single-shot story is the best-known thing about this record and it is not quite what the paperwork says: “Popular myth has the Beatles performing only one take of the song, but infallible studio documentation… proves that this is not so. They did two, and the second one was complete, not a false start or a breakdown.” What take 2 lacked was a usable voice. George Martin: “I did try a second take of ‘Twist And Shout’ but John’s voice had gone.” Take 1 is the master: “What John sang on that first take is what you hear today on record”.¹
The performance was got through on throat sweets and dairy. Norman Smith remembered the band keeping going on “a big glass jar of Zubes” and on milk; before the second attempt John “sucked a couple more Zubes, had a bit of” a gargle. A witness in the control room recalled that “John was stripped to the waist to do this most amazingly raucous vocal”. What reached the tape was “two-and-a-half minutes of Lennon shredding his vocal cords to bits”. The room knew what it had. Richard Langham, up in the Studio Two control room: “I was ready to jump up and down”. George Martin “was heard to say”: “I don’t know how they do it. We’ve been recording all day but the longer we go on the better they get.”¹
Nothing was overdubbed. No superimposition was made on the day or afterwards, so the master tape is a straight first-generation twin-track: the two tracks hold what was played and sung in the room and nothing has been copied onto anything. Almost every other song on the album carries at least one added layer; this one is the performance itself.²
It was also the one album track left without a backup. The Please Please Me material was recorded simultaneously to both a twin-track and a Delta-Mono machine, the second yielding a usable, fully-mixed mono as a safety net — but this song “was recorded only to Twin-Track and not Delta-Mono”. The explanation offered is either that the team were “too pressed for time at the end of the session to bother with the Delta-Mono mix, or that they assumed they would have to add to the song or re-record the vocal”. If it was the second, the assumption was wrong: nothing was ever added, and the vocal could not have been repeated.²
Mixing happened without the band on 25 February 1963, in the Studio One control room between 10.00am and 1.00pm, George Martin and Norman Smith working with A. B. Lincoln as second engineer. Mono first, then stereo, from the same take. With no alternative studio take in existence, every commercial issue of this song descends from that one performance.¹

Equipment Section status: Outdated

Studio	EMI Studios, Abbey Road — Studio Two (recording, 11 Feb 1963, 7.30–10.45pm); Studio One control room (mono + stereo mix, 25 Feb 1963)¹
Tape machine	“Twin-Track” (a converted BTR3 stereo machine) — two-track, predating four-track at Abbey Road; uniquely among the album’s songs it was recorded only to Twin-Track and not the parallel Delta-Mono machine; NOT the Studer J37²
Console	REDD valve desk (Studio Two control room, REDD.37 era)
Microphones	Neumann U47, U48; AKG D19 (drums); STC 4038 (overheads)
Outboard / effects	EMI RS114 valve limiter (Lennon’s vocal chain); EMT 140 plate reverb²
Guitars	Rickenbacker 325 (Lennon), Gretsch Country Gent / Tennessean (Harrison), Höfner 500/1 violin bass (McCartney), Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl kit (Starr)
Amplifiers	Vox AC30 (TB & non-Top-Boost variants)

Recording Timeline

11 February 1963 (Mon) — the day before this song, EMI Studio Two, 10.00am–6.00pm — Two blocks of work preceded the evening: There’s a Place and the song logged as Seventeen in the morning, then A Taste of Honey, Do You Want to Know a Secret, There’s a Place again, Seventeen again and Misery in the afternoon. It matters here because the voice that sings this song had already worked two full sessions when it started.¹
11 February 1963 (Mon) — takes 1–2, EMI Studio Two, 7.30–10.45pm — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: Richard Langham. Recording: Twist and Shout (takes 1–2), last in a block that also carried Hold Me Tight (takes 1–13), Anna (Go to Him) (takes 1–3), Boys (take 1), Chains (takes 1–4) and Baby It’s You (takes 1–3). Two is the lowest take count of the evening after Boys, and unlike Boys it is low because a second attempt was impossible rather than unnecessary.¹
11 February 1963 (Mon) — take 1 becomes the master; take 2 abandoned — The song was recorded in just one usable take, and the released vocal is that first take. A second take was made after a pause for Zubes and a gargle and it ran complete — not a false start or a breakdown — but the voice on it had gone, so take 1 stood. Neither take was overdubbed afterwards; the session ended with the song finished.¹
11 February 1963 (Mon) — the 10.00pm convention, and why the sheet reads 10.45 — EMI ran to booked hours, and Richard Langham’s recollection of the era is of a studio where 10.00pm meant 10.00pm and by 10.05 the room was clearing. The evening block on this sheet is logged to 10.45pm, three-quarters of an hour past the usual close, which is the institutional measure of how unusual the day was.¹
25 February 1963 (Mon) — mono then stereo mixing, EMI Studio One control room, 10.00am–1.00pm — P: George Martin. E: Norman Smith. 2E: A. B. Lincoln. Mono mixing from the take, then stereo mixing from the same take, in a control-room-only session with the Beatles absent. A second block that afternoon, 2.30–5.45pm, finished the rest of the album’s mixes and the edit of Please Please Me.¹

What John sang on that first take is what you hear today on record, arguably the most stunning rock and roll vocal and instrumental performance of all time; two-and-a-half minutes of Lennon shredding his vocal cords to bits, audibly ending with a hefty sigh cum groan of relief.— Mark Lewisohn¹

Studio Notes

The one album track with no safety copy — Running a Delta-Mono machine alongside the twin-track gave a session a usable, fully-mixed mono immediately, as insurance. This song went to twin-track alone, and the reasons offered are pressure of time at the end of the session or an expectation that more would be added later. Either way a single irreplaceable performance was committed to one tape with nothing held in reserve behind it.²
Twin-track was a converted stereo machine — “By changing its headstack, the stereo BTR3 machine could be converted into a ‘Twin-Track’ BTR3, the format preferred by George Martin” for the group’s work in this period. Backing on one track, voices on the other. The format is the reason the 1963 stereo sounds the way it does, and the reason there was no third track to put a repaired vocal on.²
First generation, and what that is worth — Because nothing was superimposed, the released master is the tape the performance went onto rather than a transfer of it. Overdubbing in 1963 meant an overdub bounce to a second machine, and what reached the master in that case was a copy of the first-generation tape. The immediacy people hear on this record is partly repertoire and performance and partly the plain absence of a copying stage.²
A live vocal cannot be quietly repaired — Vocals recorded alongside the band carry drum and guitar leakage, and a track with spill on it resists punching in: the fix drags the surrounding room with it. Kehew and Ryan reach for “‘I Saw Her Standing There’ or ‘Twist and Shout’” as the illustration of exactly that leakage, which is engineering evidence that the scream was sung in the room with the band.²
An edit piece would not have helped either — The EMI remedy for a bad passage was an edit piece, a separate re-recording of that section spliced into the master. It needs the same voice in the same condition on another day, which this vocal did not have, and it needs a passage that can be isolated, which a continuously screamed lead does not offer. Take 2 being complete rather than a breakdown makes the point sharper: the problem was never a fixable moment.²
The RS114 limiter on the voice — The EMI RS114 valve limiter sits behind the early vocal sound, and the vocals on “She Loves You” and “Twist and Shout” are named among its results. It was a difficult unit to keep in tune — “five balancing adjustments to make, and fourteen valve readings” before use, and instability was its main problem — which is part of why the compression on these records has a character rather than a setting.²
The room is on the record — The 1963 balance put a U47 in front of Ringo and let the kit and the amplifiers come off the walls of Studio Two, with a noticeable amount of ambient sound reaching the tape. The space around this vocal is largely the studio itself rather than an added treatment, which is why the track sounds like something that happened rather than something that was built.²
Hard left, hard right, and no choice about it — Track 1 of a twin-track tape was automatically panned hard left when monitored in stereo and track 2 hard right, with no panning controls for those channels. The 1963 stereo therefore puts the band in one ear and the voices in the other with nothing between them. Collapsing the image to the centre produced the mono, which is where this performance holds together.²
Two later American rebalances, twenty years apart — Capitol went back to the 1963 stereo twice to move it toward the middle: a 1976 rebalance with the two tracks shifted slightly to centre, and a second one around 1986. Both attempt what the mono achieved in 1963, by a route that starts from the wide mix rather than from the tape.²
The equipment this performance passed through — The 1963 inventory gives a REDD.37 console, an EMI BTR3 as the quarter-inch twin-track machine until 17 October, an EMI BTR2 for mono mixdown, Neumann U47, U48 and KM-54 microphones, STC4038 overheads with an STC4033-A on bass drum, and an RS124 compressor and RS127 Presence Box in the rack. After 17 October 1963 the twin-track gave way to Telefunken T9U and M10 four-track machines, eight months too late to have offered this song another track.²
Two dates for one stereo pressing — The sources do not agree on when the stereo album reached shops. The release appendix files Please Please Me as first issued 22 March 1963 with both catalogue numbers against that date; the album’s own entry elsewhere gives the stereo LP, Parlophone PCS 3042, as issued Friday 26 April 1963. The mono date is not in dispute. The stereo entry below therefore carries its catalogue number without pinning a day.¹

Releases

Every version below is one performance heard through a different balance. The question each answers is where the voice sits — in the middle with the band, off to one side of it, or somewhere pulled back toward the centre years later.

1963 UK mono LP — Please Please Me (22 March 1963, Parlophone PMC 1202, side B track 7) — Voice and band centred and level, the vocal pushing against a full arrangement rather than sitting beside it. The album’s closing track in the mix it was made for.
1963 UK stereo LP — Please Please Me (Parlophone PCS 3042, side B track 7) — The twin-track opened wide: backing hard to one channel, voices hard to the other, nothing in the centre. The strain in the vocal is more exposed and the band supports it less; it is the most revealing version and the least convincing one.
1963 UK EP — Twist and Shout (12 July 1963, Parlophone GEP 8882, side A track 1) — The 1963 mono, leading an EP named after it, with A Taste of Honey, Do You Want to Know a Secret and There’s a Place alongside. Same mix, different company.
1964 US LP and single — Introducing the Beatles (Vee Jay VJLP 1062 mono / VJSR 1062 stereo) and the Tollie 9001 single (2 March 1964, b/w There’s a Place) — The UK masters reaching America unaltered, the single carrying the mono. This is where the song became a US hit, on the 1963 mix.
1965 US LP — The Early Beatles (Capitol ST-2309 stereo / T-2309 mono) — Capitol’s own mastering of the 1963 stereo, and a mono folded down from that stereo rather than the 1963 mono. The American mono of this song is therefore not the British one, and sits differently.
1976 US LP — Rock and Roll Music (Capitol SKBO-11537) — A rebalanced stereo with the two tracks moved slightly toward the centre. The hard separation is softened rather than removed; the voice stops sounding stranded without ever really joining the band.
1986 US single — Capitol B5624 — A second rebalance of the same stereo, made after the song’s revival on film. A further nudge inward, and the closest the American stereo line gets to the centred image the mono had in 1963.
1987 CD — Please Please Me (EMI 46435-2) — Mono. Anyone who met this performance on compact disc before 2009 heard the centred 1963 mix, which is the opposite of what the format usually implies.
2009 CD — Please Please Me (Apple 82416 2) — The 1963 stereo, remastered. The image is untouched; what improves is the noise floor and the top end, which makes the vocal’s damage easier to hear rather than harder.

Sources

Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Books, 1988), 24, 26, 28, 32.
Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums (Houston: Curvebender Publishing, 2006), 141, 351, 352, 358, 360, 365, 368–69.

Frequently asked

Who wrote Twist and Shout?

“Twist and Shout” is a cover, written by Phil Medley and Bert Berns (credited Medley–Russell); the Beatles' version is not a Lennon–McCartney composition.

Who sings lead on Twist and Shout?

The lead vocal on “Twist and Shout” is by John.

When was Twist and Shout recorded?

“Twist and Shout” was recorded on 11 February 1963 at EMI Studios, Abbey Road — the last song of the day-long Please Please Me album session.¹

How many takes did Twist and Shout require?

Two takes: take 1 is the released master; take 2 was complete but John's cold-shredded voice had gone, so there was no third. The earlier “16 takes” had no documentary basis.¹

On this page

Story Section status: Outdated

What's distinctive

Recording

Equipment Section status: Outdated

Recording Timeline

Studio Notes

Releases

Sources

Frequently asked