Happy Anniversary: Cilla Black, “It’s for You”

50 years ago today, Cilla Black released “It’s for You,” the second of three tunes that John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote and passed along to her rather than recording them as Beatles songs.

In his book The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film, Richie Unterberger observed that “Love of the Loved,” the first of the Lennon/McCartney tracks compositions gifted to Black, “was something of a clean-out-the-closet throwaway,” but the same couldn’t be said of “It’s for You,” which – per no less of an authority than Sir Paul himself (in Barry Miles’ Many Years from Now) – was written specifically for her by the duo.

And merely writing it for Black wasn’t enough for them, apparently: both John and Paul managed to make it to the recording session for the song on July 2, 1964 – with Paul playing piano on the track, too – even though they’d only just arrived back in London from Sydney, Australia a few hours earlier.

In an interview on the website BeatlesBible.com (on loan from Barry Miles’ The Beatles Diary: Volume I - The Beatles Years), Black revealed that Paul had been in attendance when she recorded Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” a session which inspired him to meet up with John and try to produce something similar. While Black questioned whether they’d succeeded on that front (“for my money, it’s nothing like the ‘Anyone’ composition”), she recalled the recording of “It’s For You” with some amusement.

“That was some session we had when I made the new recording,” said Black. “John and Paul joined me, and George Martin. We made one track, and then everyone had a go at suggesting how they thought it should be recorded…and everyone had different ideas. George said it should be one way, Paul and John another, and I just added me suggestions while they were thinking of what else they could do with the composition.”

When Black’s recording of “It’s For You” hit stores less than a month later (which is pretty impressive turnaround time for that era), all of the fussing over the final product proved to be worth it: the song made it into the UK Top 10, hitting its peak of #7 on September 5, 1964. Alas, it wasn’t nearly as successful in the States, but even though it topped out at only #79 on the Billboard Top 100, it was still the highest-charting of Black’s Lennon/McCartney singles.