1967 The Beatles: All You Need Is Love

For the first live global television link in June 1967 ( 'Our World'), The Beatles were asked to contribute a song on behalf of the United Kingdom. In many ways it's the Eurovision Song Contest redux, albeit on a larger scale and without the contest element - a broadcast to such a mass audience needed something that was going to garb and hold the attention across cultural divides from the off, and in its favour that's the one thing that 'All You Need Is Love' does well - the title itself has become a neat and convenient summation of exactly what the sixties were meant to be 'about' and ironically, provides a legacy rather more lasting than the song itself.

When the surviving Beatles reconvened in 1995 to oversee the Anthology project, there was much ballyhoo beforehand regarding the 'new' song ('Free As A Bird') that was being used to promote it. Initially a low key, lo-fi demo of Lennon at the piano, The Beatles treated the fragment as if he'd just "gone for a cup of tea" and has tasked them with finishing it off. Yet for all the 'novelty' of the undertaking, I see 'All You Need Is Love' as arriving via a similar process some thirty years earlier; here Lennon provides an anthemic chorus and some guide lyric verses as a bridge to get there, but it's left to George Martin and the studio to craft the doggerel into something more substantial.

Doggerel? Did I say that? Well Ok, 'All You Need Is Love' is a trick bag of horns, orchestra, overdubbed drums, a trumpet solo, a snatch of 'In The Mood' and a blast of 'La Marseillaise', all designed to dress up sloganeering as a proper song, a move Lennon himself would revisit on 'Power To The People', 'Give Peace A Chance', 'Merry Christmas (War Is Over)' etc. It works up to a point, but the strain of repetition shows early and it's no surprise that 'All You Need Is Love' is forced to fade out in an arms linked singalong as Martin chucks every kitchen sink he can put his hands on into the mix to try and keep interest levels from waning as a shouted reprise of 'She Loves You' wades against the current to close it.

Yes, 'She Loves You' - a sarcastic piss take, or a longing throwback to an earlier time when simplicity had it's own virtue in letting quality songwriting speak for itself? Because The Beatles would never have been able to record 'All You Need Is Love' in 1963, there's just not enough song to go round four people. And with no song to speak of all that's left is that title, a title that, as I mentioned above, has transformed into a sixties artefact of greater or lesser cultural/iconic importance. It's a pedestalled piece in the museum of common cultural knowledge and part of the pithy soundbite yin of a CND symbol, Woodstock, Carnaby Street and 'flower power' to the pithy soundbite yang of Vietnam, Kent State University, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Prague Spring or Christine Keeler straddling a chair. As a song from The Beatles, it's small change.