The Beatles – “A Hard Day’s Night” Live

I Should Be Sleeping Like A Log!

“A Hard Day’s Night” was written by John Lennon. It’s the title track of The Beatles’ third studio album and also the soundtrack of their first feature film. The distinctive clanging chord which opened this song is undeniably iconic. The title also has been coined by Ringo Starr after one exhausting filming session.

Starr described it this way in an interview with disc jockey Dave Hull in 1964: “We went to do a job, and we’d worked all day and we happened to work all night. I came up still thinking it was day I suppose, and I said, ‘It’s been a hard day…’ and I looked around and saw it was dark so I said, ‘…night!’ So we came to ‘A Hard Day’s Night.'”

Thanks to George Harrison’s opening chord, one can easily identify the song way before the vocals begin. It’s so good that several have tried to analysis how George did it to the point of it being the subject of debate. Some say it could also be due to Paul’s bass playing. Man, it doesn’t matter how they did it — everyone in The Beatles are musical geniuses!

According to George Martin, “We knew it would open both the film and the soundtrack LP, so we wanted a particularly strong and effective beginning. The strident guitar chord was the perfect launch,”

Now let’s take a trip down memory lane and revisit this live performance in Paris!