H is for Help!

Being an avid Beatles Fan I have many favourite songs, albums too - Help being one of my top choices.


Robert Freeman designed many of The Beatles album covers including "Help."
The photo was taken in the Twickenham Film Studio near London, where the Beatles were finishing the last scenes from their second movie Help!. Freeman had the idea of semaphore spelling out the letters HELP, with every Beatle another letter. He got the inspiration from a scene he witnessed shooting in the Austrian Alps, with the Beatles, all dressed in black, fooling around in the snow. They were waving their arms in the air, while the music played. Freeman took publicity pictures while these scenes were shot in mid march 1965 in Obertauern.

Publicity pictures like this inspired the Help! album cover

In the studio a specially constructed platform was erected, with a white painted background. The four young men wore the black hats, coats and capes from the film wardrobe. "But when we came to do the shot the arrangement of the arms with those letters didn't look good," remembers Freeman, "So we decided to improvise and ended up with the best graphic positioning of the arms."

Ringo poses for the album cover while Victor Spinetti looks at him.

Within half an hour the pictures were taken.
Afterward, Freeman reversed some of the images, to get a more satisfying composition. For proof of this: look at John, George and Ringo’s jackets: they have the buttons on the wrong side.

John, George and Ringo reversed back again

Different poses for John and Ringo - session outtakes

The Beatles actually spell out "NUJV"

This is how "HELP" would have looked like with real semaphore.

In Holland, another version of the Help! sleeve was manufactured, with a giant Shell logo in the background. Most of the vinyl and all of the sleeves that make up this legendary item were manufactured in Holland but a few copies of the vinyl were also pressed in Sweden. This LP with its alternate picture sleeve was only ever issued to Shell employees and was never available to purchase in the shops.

The famous Dutch / Swedish Shell Help! LP cover, 1979.

During the years, there has been some discussion whether or not the Beatles' hand positions spell anything. It didn’t help that, in the US, the photos on the front cover were rearranged, from George-John-Paul-Ringo to George-Ringo-John-Paul (so that Paul appeared to be pointing to the Capitol logo?). And the image of George is reversed again. By all accounts, the semaphore remains gibberish: the various semaphore messages and their interpretations which have been ascribed to the HELP! cover, over the years are unfounded. The intention behind the arm positions was good "graphic positioning", not good semaphore.

USA Help! album

To accommodate lettering advertising the songs, the pictures of the Beatles were shrunk on the cover of the Capitol version of Help!.

There are no sleeve notes , but like on the back cover of A Hard Day’s Night, there are again four head shots taken by Freeman.

Help! back cover - Robert Freeman

What is your favourite Beatles song?

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An InLinkz Link-up

L is for Love Songs

Some noted philosopher once declared: "You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs. But I look around me and I see it isn't so. Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs. And what's wrong with that? I'd like to know, 'cause here I go again."

That sage, of course, was one Sir James Paul McCartney, who wrote the song with his late wife Linda. Sir Paul's previous group, the Beatles, wrote a lot of love songs. Lennon/McCartney composed a bunch they gave to others, and the pre-success Fab Four covered love songs that appear on Live at the BBC and Anthology 1.

Here are some Beatles' songs with Love (or Loving) in the title, with links to the songs:

Love Me Do (1962) - pretty simple, or even simplistic, but became a big hit (UK 4, US 1) eventually.
P.S. I Love You (1962) - sweet song which went to UK 4, US 10.
She Loves You (1963) - despite the "yeah, yeah, yeah", a rather sophisticated piece for its time, written in the third person. #1 on both sides of the pond.
All My Loving (1963) — breaks into an almost rockabilly bridge. US #45.
Can't Buy Me Love (1964) - the significance of this song is that when the Beatles had the Top 5 songs in the US, on April 4, 1964, this was #1. Topped the charts in the UK, too.
And I Love Her (1964) - a beautiful song from A Hard Day's Night, went US #12.
Words of Love (1964) a Buddy Holly cover from the Beatles for Sale album.
You've Got to Hide Your Love Away (1965) - a sad song from the Help! soundtrack.
It's Only Love (1965) - album cut on Help! (UK), Rubber Soul (US).
Love You To (1966) - Revolver album cut, complete with sitar.
All You Need Is Love (1967) - now this IS a silly love song.
"There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy."
But I love it anyway, especially the She Loves You reprise. #1 on both sides of the pond.
Real Love (1995) - the completion of a 1979 John Lennon song that appears on Anthology 2 (UK 4, US 11).

The Cirque du Soleil soundtrack of Beatle mashups is appropriately titled LOVE. BTW, John Lennon's 72nd birthday would have been next week (October 9).

Now go show some LOVE to your fellow ABC Wednesday colleagues and visit!