What Beatles critics don’t get

Not everyone likes The Beatles. That said, trashing cultural icons is a modern phenomenon amplified by social media and done, largely, to attract attention. Yet whether you hate them or love them (yeah, yeah, yeah), their influence on pretty much everything pop music has offered since is, surely, undeniable.

Sixty years ago they left an indelible imprint on both music and film that continues to this day. In April 1964, John Lennon and Paul McCartney sat down in a hotel room and wrote a song to accompany the title of the band’s first (and best) feature film, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. The song itself is typical of their early output. A sugary song about love, less than three minutes long yet its significance cannot be underestimated.

The film of the same name was a black and white, only slightly fictional account of 36 hours in the lives of the band in which they played themselves.