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Four scousers who changed the world (© Cat's/Corbis KIPA)

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In its mono incarnation, Please Please Me is soulful and exhilarating and of the eight original McCartney/Lennon compositions – as they were credited initially – and the six covers, to our ears there are only three non-essential songs here.

Merseybeat standard Chains and Ringo-sung Shirelles-cover and live favourite Boys feel like side one filler, while Paul's reading of the schmaltzy A Taste Of Honey kills the momentum on an otherwise near-perfect second side.

However, from a technological perspective, it is interesting to note A Taste Of Honey's significance for being the first Beatles recording to feature a double-tracked vocal as opposed to John and Paul singing in unison or harmony.

Charmingly referred to in Tony Barrow's original sleeve notes as a "trick duet", two twin-track tape machines were used simultaneously to allow McCartney to duplicate his lead vocal. Double-tracked vocals and later automatic/artificial double tracking would become a feature of Beatles recordings, but here it is for the first time.

With the new mono disc delivering few surprises – other than a slightly longer fade on Baby It's You – we approach the stereo edition with a little trepidation.

New sleeve notes acknowledge that the recordings made on two-track were designed to provide an effective balance between instruments and vocals when creating the masters and that the stereo mix provides the "unusual experience of hearing all the voices on the right side with all the instruments coming from the left."

"Countless rehearsals and performances and a super-size helping of talent oiled the gears of a thrilling pop machine."

Some songs fare better than others in stereo, but overall immediacy and punch is lost, largely as a result of the bass being pushed hard into the left channel. Meanwhile the additional reverb applied to a stereo mix as standard in 1963 is distracting, particularly when listening on headphones.

That's not to say that listening to these stereo mixes is without reward. The increased separation brings hitherto buried instrumental subtleties and quirks to the forefront.

Please Please Me (the song) – with all but the harmonica part assembled from a different combination of takes to the mono version – sees Lennon sing the wrong lyric in the final verse and there's even a slight chuckle perceptible in his delivery of the subsequent "come on".

As the original 1962 tapes of Love Me Do and PS I Love You were discarded, those songs are present in their mono incarnations on the stereo CD and here, slap bang in the middle of the running order their dynamism only serves to highlight the shortcomings of stereo mixes derived from twin-track recordings.

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