(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 25 September 2025 14:30, UK
1964. Four boys from Liverpool, all on a flight to America, all unaware that their silly little band, The Beatles, were about to change music forever.
When they took to the stage and performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, they completely took over America and changed the way that people viewed music. Musicians stopped pining for solo careers and started forming bands, record labels took note and learnt how they could change the way they marketed musical outfits, while other British bands finally saw the States as a viable market.
It’s funny now that we have access to the band’s full discography to hear those early songs and understand just how much of a profound impact they had on people. The early music that the band released was incredibly tame compared to some of the songs that would come later on records such as Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. The Beatles, towards the end of their career, would effectively launch their own counterculture. However, the pop-infused upbeat tracks that made up the beginning of the ‘60s were enough to initially put the band on the map.
John Lennon was always keen on making more ambitious music with The Beatles. While he was the driving force behind a lot of these early, catchy tunes, he felt as though the band was being watered down somewhat in the music they made, how they dressed, and how they acted. This is why it took a while for their more ambitious music to reveal itself.
“We weren’t as open and as truthful when we didn’t have the power to be […] We had to take it easy. We had to shorten our hair to leave Liverpool. We had to wear suits to get on TV. We had to compromise,” said Lennon. “We had to get hooked to get in, and then get a bit of power and say, ‘This is what we’re like’ […] We had to falsify a bit, even if we didn’t realise it at the time.”
However, while the band might have had to compromise on a lot of their music early on in their career, that drive to push themselves as musicians and creatives was still front and centre, it just presented itself in much more subtle ways. Even when they were writing music that was a lot more pop-centric, they were finding interesting ways to make their songs sound different from a lot of the other music out there.
You can hear this (albeit subtly) on the track ‘I’ll Follow The Sun’. The song was written by Paul McCartney when he was 16, and as such, it has a similar sound to a lot of The Beatles’ early material.
“‘I’ll Follow The Sun’ was one of those very early ones. I seem to remember writing it just after I’d had the flu and I had that cigarette – I smoked when I was 16 – the cigarette that’s the ‘cotton wool’ one,” said McCartney. “You don’t smoke while you’re ill, but after you get better, you have a cigarette, and it’s terrible, it tastes like cotton wool, horrible. I remember standing in the parlour, with my guitar, looking out through the lace curtains of the window, and writing that one.”
Because the song had a relatively similar sound to a lot of The Beatles’ early material, and as such, the band were keen on trying to implement a sound that wasn’t present on their other tracks. They decided to use Ringo Starr in a bid to do this, as rather than having him use his drumkit, they opted for a sound which was… a bit more natural sounding.
“On the record, we got Ringo to tap his knees. We were thinking in terms of singles and the next one had to always be different,” McCartney concluded. “We didn’t want to fall into the Supremes trap where they all sounded rather similar, so to that end, we were always keen on having varied instrumentation. Ringo couldn’t keep changing his drum kit, but he could change his snare, tap a cardboard box or slap his knees.”
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