“I Saw Her Standing There” by The Beatles

The Beatles' first album, Please Please Me, kicks off in 1963 with "I Saw Her Standing There", and a band could hardly build a better front door: a thumping beat and Paul McCartney tearing into the lead vocal like the dance hall is about to close. McCartney and John Lennon wrote it together, Lennon backs him up on vocals and shares electric guitar duty with George Harrison, Ringo Starr drives it from the kit, and all four clap along.

George Martin produced it with Norman Smith at the desk, and the sound fairly bursts at the seams. In America it also opened Introducing... The Beatles, and Capitol tucked it onto the flip side of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in December 1963, where it climbed to number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 on its own steam.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.