This was one of John Lennon's first songs to tell a complete story. The boy knocks on his girl's door, knows she is home because he sees her in the window, but she does not answer. Lennon wrote the song when he was inspired by the song "Silhouettes." He said, "I had that image of walking down the street and seeing her silhouetted in the window and not answering the phone." Music publisher Dick James told Lennon that it was the first "complete" song that John had ever written: It had a beginning and an end.
This starts with a vocal, which was rare for the time.
This was yet another early Beatles song originally written for another artist. "No Reply" was written for Tommy Quickly, another Liverpudlian who was also signed to Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Quickly never recorded and released the song, so the Beatles used it themselves. Quickly's story rapidly deteriorated; he had a number of singles that failed to chart, then one minor hit, "Wild Side of Life," before fading back into obscurity. This Mersey Beat article seems to indicate that he just wasn't cut out for the spotlight.
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