Of course the Bea­t­les had to make an appear­ance in this blog. Unde­ni­ably the most influ­en­tial bands of the rock era, they took the musi­cal world by storm, hav­ing grad­u­al­ly built their rep­u­ta­tion over three years from their for­ma­tion in 1960. They hold a rock-sol­id place in the hearts of most peo­ple of my gen­er­a­tion and of many peo­ple since. But which song to choose from a canon so replete with the sub­lime?

I have gone with a song so utter­ly exem­plary of the Bea­t­les sound and feel, from their ear­ly hey­day, and pos­i­tive­ly drip­ping with their youth­ful exu­ber­ance and melod­ic vir­tu­os­i­ty. Writ­ten by Lennon and McCart­ney in the base­ment of Jane Ash­er’s par­ents’ house in Wim­pole Street, Lon­don; record­ed at Abbey Road’s stu­dio two; and released in the UK on 29^th Novem­ber 1963, it’s I Want To Hold Your Hand. It sold more than a mil­lion copies on advanced orders alone, on the back of the suc­cess of She Loves You, and became the group’s first US num­ber one, kick-start­ing the British Inva­sion of Amer­i­ca.

Of all the tele­vised ver­sions of the song (notably on the Ed Sul­li­van Show, with the famous intro­duc­tion “Here they are…the Bea­t­les!”), I found this ver­sion from the More­cambe and Wise Show in 1964. Played live, it’s absolute­ly bril­liant. Lennon’s and McCart­ney’s voic­es are con­stant­ly switch­ing between uni­son and har­mo­ny, and there is a won­der­ful inter­play between Lennon’s riffs and George Harrison’s sub­tle gui­tar fills. And through­out, of course, they just look so damn good togeth­er; it’s a delight to watch.