74: THE BEATLES
All You Need Is Love/ Baby You're A Rich Man
(Parlophone, 1967)

HONESTLY, I've tried where possible to bypass The Beatles while compiling this list, but they're as omnipresent and unignorable in my worldview as... well, I was going to say backache, but they're considerably more pleasurable than that.

Let's just imagine for the sake of argument that every other band in history are vol au vents, and The Beatles are the vol au vents chef in the guise of Nigella Lawson in a carelessly unfastened blouse. Under such circumstances, concentrating on the vol au vents necessarily becomes a tad troublesome - and there's the quandary.

Over the years, naysayers have had a whale of a time in dissecting All You Need Is Love: its sentiments are facile, it wasn't really recorded live, yada yada. Well, I cordially invite those naysayers to kiss my readily proffered bottom.

Is love all you need? Yes, actually. With love comes compassion and consideration, and literally everything else including food, water and money follows on from that - or would do, in the kind of utopian world we will never experience but which, just briefly, seemed within our grasp in the climate of heady naivety which characterised the summer of Sgt Pepper.

Was All You Need Is Love pre-recorded? A backing track was, certainly - a belt-and-braces measure to avert potential calamity, given that the event for which it was written - the BBC Our World programme of June 25, 1967 - was a historic live satellite broadcast beamed to an estimated 350 million people.

You'd want a modicum of security and reassurance under those circumstances, would you not?

Producer George Martin and balance engineer Geoff Emerick still had to co-ordinate live feeds for vocals, instrumental overdubs and an entire bloody orchestra; and all of this in a week in which George's father had just died, the Martins were in the throes of moving house and George's wife was heavily pregnant.

There, in that gentlemanly stoicism, is one element of what really made Britain great. The other element, of course, is embodied in All You Need Is Love's playful yet quietly insistent message of optimism and empowerment: everything is possible, everything is within your grasp, love will light the way.

Not a bad message to convey to 350 million people; what a pity so many of them weren't really listening.