(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 21 January 2026 16:26, UK
Fight among yourselves, but if you genuinely want to stand in front of another human being and try to pretend that The Beatles are, if not the greatest, then certainly the most influential band of all time, then you are simply wasting valuable air. They might not be to your taste, you might think them overplayed and oversaturated, and you might have a point. But the seeds of influence four lads from Liverpool sowed into the fertile world of music are undeniable.
To this day, we are still reaping the crop they laid down. A band so devoted to innovation there are calls to note them as the founding fathers of so many rock genres is one thing, but to achieve that while still being one of the best-selling bands of all time and as relevant six decades after their first song as they were when it was released is the kind of cultural staying power usually reserved for emperors.
Every career has to start somewhere, but most careers don’t kick off with a top 20 hit. Then again, most bands aren’t The Beatles. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been writing songs both together and apart for a number of years up to that point, they managed to strike gold on their first under their own name when ‘Love Me Do’ peaked at number 17 on the UK singles chart in late 1962.
“‘Love Me Do’ was completely co-written,” McCartney recalled to Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now. “It might have been my original idea but some of them really were 50-50s, and I think that one was. It was just Lennon and McCartney sitting down without either of us having a particularly original idea.”
“We loved doing it, it was a very interesting thing to try and learn to do, to become songwriters,” McCartney continued. “I think why we eventually got so strong was we wrote so much through our formative period. ‘Love Me Do’ was our first hit, which ironically is one of the two songs that we control, because when we first signed to EMI they had a publishing company called Ardmore and Beechwood which took the two songs, ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘PS I Love You’, and in doing a deal somewhere along the way we were able to get them back.”
A fresh-faced Fab Four. (Credits: Far Out / Public Domain / ingen uppgift)
Lennon remembers it slightly differently. “‘Love Me Do’ is Paul’s song. He wrote it when he was a teenager,” Lennon proclaimed to David Sheff in 1980. “Let me think. I might have helped on the middle eight, but I couldn’t swear to it. I do know he had the song around, in Hamburg, even, way, way before we were songwriters.”
“Introducing our own numbers started around Liverpool and Hamburg,” Lennon also said. “‘Love Me Do’, one of the first ones we wrote, Paul started when he must have been about 15. It was the first one we dared to do of our own. This was quite a traumatic thing because we were doing such great numbers of other people’s, of Ray Charles and [Little] Richard and all of them.” Concluding: “It was quite hard to come in singing ‘Love Me Do’. We thought our numbers were a bit wet. But we gradually broke that down and decided to try them.”
Although Lennon might have been a bit apprehensive, the rest of the band was over the moon when the single was pressed. “For me, that was more important than anything else,” Ringo Starr claimed in 1976. “That first piece of plastic. You can’t believe how great that was. It was so wonderful. We were on a record!”
‘Love Me Do’ would be the first step in The Beatles’ path towards world domination, and for McCartney, it was validation that The Beatles were here to stay. “In Hamburg, we clicked. At the Cavern, we clicked. But if you want to know when we ‘knew’ we’d arrived, it was getting in the charts with ‘Love Me Do’,” McCartney claims. “That was the one. It gave us somewhere to go.” And that is the point.
Starting is usually half the battle. Those who usually happily proclaim the band to be an oversimplified pop group usually feel similarly unimpressed by the works of Andy Warhol or Mark Rothko, noting that their art is so simple in construction that it can’t be any good. But that is missing the point. The Beatles saw their opportunity to write songs that they wanted to dance to, with lyrics they wanted to sing and they set about doing it. What’s more, they actually went and did it.
‘Love Me Do’ is probably not often regarded as the band’s greatest effort. In fact, I would wholly judge someone who said it was. But it began a domino effect of songwriting that would lead them to become perhaps the most important band in recent history, and for that reason alone, it might well be considered the one song that started it all.
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