There’s no love without loss. Unless someone is living a life completely void of any attachment or joy, experiencing heartbreak is an inevitability. It is one of the few things that unites us as a truly universal experience, even if everyone feels it slightly differently.
For me, the relics of heartbreaks sit gathering dust in a so-called ‘Ex-Box’, full of tokens like concert tickets, books with handwritten notes, and jewellery too fraught with feeling to ever wear. But there’s one item I could never abandon: I’m still wearing it, and it’s a The Beatles T-shirt.
The Beatles remain a musical phenomenon like no other. It is impossible to think of another artist with such a vast reach and such broad-ranging awareness because, quite literally, no one else has ever hit the heights they did. It would be an incredibly difficult, if not unattainable, task to try and find someone who doesn’t know a Beatles song. Their lyrics, their likeness, and even their merch have been replicated over and over, passed down through generations now. A Beatles T-shirt is not a hard thing to come by. Like millions of others around the world, I could acquire a new one easily. But this is the story of that one, the one that started my love for the band and continues to bring me back to them year after year.
It started when I was 15 and in the back of my first boyfriend’s mother’s car—two teenagers holding hands, feeling like we’d originated the emotions that emanated from the car speakers. Every song was just a soundtrack made for us. “Ah, I love this song,” his mother suddenly said, turning it up. The guitars are chugging. The beat is thumping. My crush removes his hand from mine to hit his knee like a high hat, and then everyone’s singing. “Get back”, she says, “get back!” he echoes, “get back to where you once belonged”, and I join in. I knew the words because approximately a month before, when I learnt that the boy I fancied at school liked The Beatles, I studied them like it was another one of my exam subjects.
And therein lay the seeds of obsession. What began as an attempt to impress a boy morphed into something genuine, tied to my very fabric, just like a first love. Like hoards have done before me and continue to do today, as interest in the band never quits. I dove into the vast world of Beatles lore, learning the facts and reading the stories. As a gift, that first boyfriend’s family gave me an old relic of a French T-shirt, declaring a new single from Les Beatles! I wore it and felt like the biggest fan on the planet, or like I understood this group in a way no one else could, having dove deep into the trenches of their discography, which is exactly how every fan feels.
In my teenage view, despite being undeniably the biggest band in the world, The Beatles had been struck by the curse of a few bad big-hit singles. ‘All You Need Is Love’ falls down with a pappy willingness to swim amid the commercial shallows. Despite being as ubiquitous as ‘Happy Birthday‘, even the emotional ‘Let It Be’ is surely growing tiresome. It’s exactly the reason why people take to social media to claim what I think might be the stupidest statement in the world: “The Beatles are overrated”.
It’s an easy camp to fall into. If you only listen to the band’s most shared hits or early tracks, their genuine experimentation and pioneering efforts will remain lost to you. And maybe what I’ve realised most is that when you stop caring, the band shuts their door to you, too.
That first boyfriend and I broke up a year later, and the T-shirt, along with my love for The Beatles, was relegated to the box. I cast them out for a while as a casualty of heartbreak warfare. Even by 18, as I moved away for university, I tried to roll my eyes and label the band as “OK, nothing special”. I was lying to myself.
All wounds heal eventually, and I gradually stopped skipping or groaning at the sound of the Fab Four. Sometimes I’d listen to my all-time favourite: ‘Oh Darling!’, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and sing along. But for years, I never thought much about them. They faded into their roles as global phenomena, distant figures that aren’t engaged with but simply witnessed.
Then I landed this job. Suddenly, as a teenager trying to get a crush to like me again, I was diving back into the facts to try and win the affection of the world of music journalism. I read all the stories and listened to all the albums while I wrote about their best songs or the history of the Get Back sessions and whatever else came my way. I once again found myself staring into the vast pool of Beatles history and being keener than ever to glide through its mesmerising waters. The deeper I dove, the better it was.
I recently listened to every finale song from all 12 of their albums and jokingly said to my colleague, “You know what? The Beatles were actually really good”. A silly little comment, but its humour lies in its outright and obvious truth. Of course, The Beatles were good. But there is a beautiful phenomenon with the band that the more you put in, the more you get out.
That’s exactly why the band, perhaps more so than any other legacy band, have not only held onto their fans but still manage to find new ones, despite being long gone. Even on TikTok, a platform overrun with Gen-Zs and Gen-Alphas, there is a thriving, new cult of fanatics donning ‘Paul Is My Husband’ badges, turning interview clips into trending memes and buzzing over tracks like ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ like it’s a fresh hit. Just as I discovered at 15, every day there are new people unearthing the wealth of stories, songs and facts about the four-piece because with each hit of the metaphorical shovel, the more exciting their world presents itself. Beatlesmania has never and likely will never die because of this reason. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle of obsession where the now immortal material makes the band more interesting, more exciting and fans more likely to hit play on album cuts or B-sides that the average listener wouldn’t get to on the ‘Best Of’ mixes.
If you care enough to thoroughly traverse their discography, the band becomes a whole other beast. It’s only when you track them from the rock and roll days of the mid-1960s through to the insanely adventurous carnage of tracks like ‘A Day In The Life’ that the big picture of the Fab Four is born. Labels like “experimental” or “pioneering” are thrown around, but when you peel back that top layer of tired old hits, the words don’t seem great enough for the Liverpudlian boys.
In their work, there are strains of everything that would come after. ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, with all its theatre, paved the way for the likes of Elton John and Queen. Tracks like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Dear Prudence’ have had a limitless impact on psych-rock and all the hazy tunes that came out of the 1990s and still now, in the 2020s. Even their early songs like ‘Eight Days a Week’ or ‘Help!’, while they may seem pedestrian to modern listeners, were an essential leading light for generations to come.
Without those songs, mainstream rock and roll may never have taken off in the way it did, forever changing the shape and sound of music. There may have been no Bruce Springsteen, no Oasis, no David Bowie, and no Blondie because how could you ever be a rock act pioneering modern takes on the genre without the band that broke the mould and did it first?
Just as it’s laughable to say, “The Beatles were actually really good”, it’s absurd to try and claim they’re overrated. Is water overrated? Air? An essential just can’t be quantifiable like that.
I knew all that at 15, and now, I know it again at 25. The second I started listening properly again, their exciting world opened back up, still offering new tales to learn about and new sounds to hear in their lesser-known album cuts. I don’t know when I got the T-shirt back out of the box, but it’s a treasure now. I wear it constantly and fight off the stealing hands of friends or future partners, smiling to myself every time someone inevitably compliments it. “I love The Beatles”, I say like an eternal teenager, and it seems the more I do, the more they love me back, offering more and greater intrigue and audio greatness like a gift waiting for anyone to unwrap, if they only listen a little closer.