Paul McCartney and John Lennon Wrote this Beatles Hit While Riding a Tour Bus
John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote several of The Beatles’ biggest hits. A few songs were written in unique places that wouldn’t usually possess the best songwriting atmosphere. However, McCartney and Lennon often wrote songs whenever inspiration struck, and the two wrote one of their earliest hits while riding a tour bus.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote ‘From Me to You’ on a bus
The Beatles formed in 1960, but it took the band two years to get their first big hit with “Love Me Do.” Their second single, “Please Please Me,” reached No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart. The Beatles were on the rise following that song and later went on tour as the supporting act for singer Helen Shapiro. In Anthology, John Lennon said he and Paul McCartney wrote their third single, “From Me to You” on the tour bus.
“The night Paul and I wrote ‘From Me To You’, we were on the Helen Shapiro tour, on the coach, traveling from York to Shrewsbury,” Lennon shared. “We weren’t taking ourselves seriously – just fooling around on the guitar – when we began to get a good melody line, and we really started to work at it.”
“Before that journey was over, we’d completed the lyric, everything,” he continued. “I think the first line was mine, and we took it from there. What puzzled us was why we’d thought of a name like ‘From Me To You’. It had me thinking when I picked up the NME to see how we were doing in the charts. Then I realized – we’d got the inspiration from reading a copy on the coach. Paul and I had been talking about one of the letters in the From You To Us column.”
‘From Me to You’ became their third single
Before writing “From Me to You,’ The Beatles had already written “Thank You Girl”. This was meant to be the A-side for their third single. However, after playing the song, many said they preferred “From Me to You,” so John Lennon and Paul McCartney decided to make it the A-side and make “Thank You Girl” the B-side.
“We’d already written ‘Thank You Girl’ as the follow-up to ‘Please Please Me’,” Lennon stated. “This new number was to be the b-side. We were so pleased with it, we knew we just had to make it the a-side, ‘Thank You Girl’ the b.”
Shapiro confirmed that The Beatles played “From Me to You,” and she believed the track was better than the other.
“I remember John and Paul coming up to me to ask if I would like to hear a couple of songs that they had just written,” Shapiro recalled (via Far Out). “They were looking for opinions because they were undecided about which should be their next single. We crowded around a piano and Paul played, while the two of them sang their latest composition. One was ‘Thank You Girl’, and the other was ‘From Me To You’, which I liked best.”
The song was The Beatles first No. 1 hit in the U.K.
“From Me to You” debuted in 1963 and became the first Beatles song to reach No. 1 on the U.K. singles chart. It was also released in the United States, and while it didn’t reach the same heights as the U.K., it did become the first Beatles song to appear on a national Billboard chart. It may not have been their biggest hit, but it’s possibly the one that put The Beatles on the map.
