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The first album was really a recycle of their repertoire.
"With The Beatles" was the first songbook sort of speak.
In the early days, we were really set on giving people their money's worth of the record,
and that was our policy, just put 14 tracks a side-it was brand new,
and never put singles on the albums which everybody did... Have a hit single and make an album around it.
They gave me a list of their songs and...
They were all thinking in terms of singles still...
We weren't thinking in terms of an album being, you know, a piece of... An entity by itself.
It was a collection of songs, and all we did was to record singles,
and the ones that weren't too good we wouldn't issue as singles, we'd put on an album,
which is what "With The Beatles" was.
Robert Freeman, who took this picture
copied, our request actually, copied Astrid Kirchherr's photographs.
We showed him the pictures that we took in Hamburg with Astrid and said, "Why can't you do it like this?"
In those early days, it was primarly the American rhythm and blues sound that was their inspiration.
I think this is probably what the so-called "Beatles sound" was, because all the black music was a tremendous influence on them.
The Beatles' second LP, "With The Beatles", has broken the record for advance sales of an LP.
"With The Beatles" has an advance of a quarter of a million, a record which was previously held by Elvis Presley's "Blue Hawaii".
Brian Epstein could well be right in his prediction, that the Beatles, one day, will be bigger than Elvis Presley.