During a photographic assignment on the morning of 3 June 1964, Ringo Starr was taken ill with tonsillitis and pharyngitis, 24 hours before the Beatles were due to leave for a six-country tour.
After running through six songs in a one-hour rehearsal in EMI's Studio Two,[1] everyone felt satisfied with Nicol's drumming, so he left to pack his suitcase.
[2] That evening, in a four-hour session in Studio Two, each of the three present Beatles recorded a demo of a newly written song.
Harrison recorded "You Know What to Do"; John Lennon did "No Reply", which eventually ended up as the opening track of their next album, Beatles for Sale; and Paul McCartney did "It's for You", a song which was written specifically for Cilla Black to sing.
Musicologist Dominic Pedler cites the song as an example of how "one of The Beatles' greatest contributions to pop songwriting was their skill in combining the familiarity of simple I-IV-V sequences with dramatically new harmonic material".