All You Need is Love, or: How The Beatles’ 1 Changed My Life
Adela Teubner · February 9 2017
Like a lot of those who fall in my age bracket, the ritual of buying one’s first album was not especially ceremonious for me. All I did was log onto my iPad, enter a redemption code for an iTunes card, and click the “download” button on the album that I coveted - no flipping through crates of vinyl while an eccentric record shop owner tells me that the one I just glanced past will totally change my life, no nervously approaching a shop assistant searching for a copy of what my best friend’s cool older sister has scribbled on a scrap of paper for me, not even a physical item to show my future children as I rant about how much better things were in my day. But then, the album in question still entirely changed the course of my life in a kind of mythical way, so I guess there’s this, and the following is the story of how it did just that.
For many years, I attended a typically upper-class, conservative school - and for some time, I didn’t mind this at all. I loved the straw boater hats and silver tie pins and modest tartan dresses we had to wear perfectly, and how we had to chorus ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ by heart at the end of every assembly. I liked the way our music programme consisted of proper string ensembles where we played Mozart and Beethoven, even in primary school, and how my violin teacher enrolled me in practical exams before I’d even hit my preteens; still yet, how our teachers called us “ladies”, how its events and assemblies and uniforms had barely changed in its near 100 years of existence, even how the uniform guide specified what kind of underwear we had to buy (black or navy blue in boyleg shape, for the curious!).
My home was not from that sort of world at all, so maybe I was kind of bewitched by the contrast to it afforded by the school’s traditionality and status symboling - and so, I found myself absorbing everything I could about it, trying to fit in with the litany of my classmates who thought that the sort of well-behaved, Stepford Wives-ian life promoted to us was the only proper path one could take in life. (Of course, this isn’t to say it was all bad. Once I hit high school I had some amazing teachers, and they taught me of some legitimately endearing qualities like work ethic and formal etiquette, and I think I found having things to quietly rebel against more invigorating and thrilling than perhaps I should have - not to mention I met my best friend there too!).
But then, when I was maybe ten or eleven, I heard The Beatles. This occured one morning in the Summer, when among the school’s more liberal teachers played ‘All You Need Is Love’ while the orchestra I was in packed up our equipment after a performance - and it wasn’t that I hadn’t heard The Beatles before, for how could I have grown up in a post-1960s world and not at least heard them in the distance on the radio, as muzak in the supermarket, their faces in the modern history documentaries on the arts channel on TV? I even knew the song in question, having considered Love, Actually to be my favourite movie the previous Christmas.
Perhaps the dramatic implications of my use of italics and short sentences in this section might puzzle you, for maybe you see The Beatles as kind of an omnipresent historical entity that you hear about in school, the music that your grandparents like. But I’d never actually listened to that song until this morning - and dearest reader, I beg you to remember the previous paragraph and, with such context, imagine just how alien and a single strum of a guitar would sound when you’ve been told from single digits that musical expression only becomes valid when it was written for aristocracy at least two centuries prior, that anything with lyrics and a beat is frivolous and beneath you, because I sure can’t use words to describe how I felt when I did.
I then discussed how cool I thought this song that I sort of knew was with my best friend at the time - also a member of said orchestra - as it played, and lo and behold, she informed me that she was already a massive Beatles fan! She introduced me to a whole new slew of their songs across the ensuing lunch periods, and I cannot adequately express just how much my little preteen heart ached with excitement, allure, passion, every time her iPod played a different track.
Of course, I adored the musicality of each - perhaps the reason why I fell in love with them instead of, say, The Rolling Stones or The Doors, was because their songs relied on many of the traditional musical elements that my classically-trained ears could relate to - but there was something kind of bizarrely rebellious about the way they strummed their guitars, the way they screamed about innocent desire and one’s relationship with the world, even in the way that John Lennon’s face made my heart beat faster (I would think of myself as so much more superior to the Justin Bieber fans with whom I shared a class, but really, were their declarations of love toward their pop demigod that different to my own feelings toward my beloved John?), and I loved that. I listened to these songs, and I realised that I had found a world in which I could belong, a world so much more exciting and beautiful and me than any that I’d known prior.
I listened to these songs, and I saw that I wasn’t at all like these people that I went to school with, that I was so fascinated by, with whom I wanted to fit in - I saw that I could never conform to the mild-mannered privilege with which we were expected to meld, that I simply wanted more for myself - and that maybe that was okay. And what adolescent - even one as unassuming I was then - doesn’t like being rebellious, right?
Anyway, within a few months, I was wholeheartedly obsessed. I also found myself rather bored, the school musical I’d also had a lead role in and which had consumed most of my time that year thus far having wrapt up. During one such following aimless scroll through the Internet, I came across a greatest hits compilation on iTunes by the name of 1 with a hyperlink underneath that read “The Beatles” - and it occurred to me, I could buy this, I could listen to them whenever I pleased! So, I set about doing just this - but of course, it couldn’t be that simple. For some reason, I was entirely convinced without any basis whatsoever that my parents hated The Beatles, so I spent many a diary entry crafting a plan as to how I’d obtain this album.
I think the deal was to nonchalantly buy myself an iTunes card, to redeem this one carefully chosen afternoon with my mum in tow, and then to “randomly” come across the Beatles album and claim that I needed to buy a selection of the songs for my violin lessons, but wouldn’t it just be so much better if I got the whole album instead? Needless to say, my parents had no problem with my purchasing, and were probably pleased that I wanted to buy said album in place of, say, a Justin Bieber song or whatever was popular then - maybe I just invented this ploy to continue the rebellious racing in my heart I felt every time my friend and I sang their songs at the top of our lungs at school.
And I remember how I felt in the aftermath of that afternoon- how I wrote an entry in my diary that consisted pretty much entirely of scrambled capital letters, the sheer exhilaration that flooded me as I pressed play on ‘Penny Lane’, how I felt compelled to tell everyone I knew that I now had a Beatles album, how I went to a play the next day but I couldn’t concentrate because all I could think about were all the new songs that I’d just discovered. I loved them even more, to the point that I could barely sleep some nights, where I’d lie on the oval and draw a love heart around John Lennon’s and my initials in the dirt, where I’d sit on the couch every afternoon and daydream about them whisking me away to 1960s London, with this album constantly reverberating about my mind - I loved them, with the same kind of intensity that perhaps a less introverted preteen would her first date. Maybe that’s another reason why I adored them so - that they supplied me with the same innocent, beautiful rushing of the heart that their songs so often described, the joys of being a teenager that I desired and yet was too shy to ever find outside of my mind.
For many, it’s the album itself that is the peak - but in my case, it was only a small beginning, and for the next two or three years they were my whole world. The greatest hits collection on my iPad became Rubber Soul, and then a collection of first-edition vinyl pressings of each of their studio albums. I began to dream about being in a rock band of my own, so I started playing guitar, something that made me feel cool and transcendent and dangerous in its own right - for the classical music I’d been playing on violin had never been my music, but the joy I felt as the riffs slipped off my fingers told me that this was, and plus, what greater sin could a promising young soloist commit than picking up a rock instrument?
They inspired me to channel my love for them into the writing I’d always enjoyed creating, and hence, I published my personal blog a couple of years after the events of this article, with the appropriate name of All You Need is The Beatles. I went to my hairdresser with a picture of John Lennon circa Rubber Soul, and asked her to cut my bangs as such - and of course, this was a stylistic failure of monumental proportions, in my failing to realise that John Lennon’s hair was not thick and curly like my own, but I loved it at the time, and it made me feel interesting and different in a way that their music made me want to be.
I decided that I wanted to go to university, that I wanted to write, and make art, and most significantly, make brash, important music, things that I’d been too scared - or simply too unaware - to consider prior; I listened to each of their albums on repeat and repeat and repeat, until I’d memorised each brushing of the wrong guitar string and glitch with the recording technology. And, the dangerous, rebellious instinct I so loved them for inspiring in me turned out to be literally true, when a little while later, one of the school's music teachers called me aside before a solo performance in which I planned to play ‘In My Life’ on my violin and suggested that I “leave the popular music for home” - and as such, I only adored them even more, and their fierce, catchy passion only made me even more determined to pursue my dreams, my identity. I had a concept of who I was entirely of my own accord - I knew who I wanted to be, and I’d built this myself - and I can’t tell you how proud I was of this.
I don’t listen to The Beatles much anymore, for when you’ve listened to something 400 times and you can recreate it entirely perfectly in your head, do you really need to? In fact, perhaps the only conspicuous evidence of such a phase in my life is my continual wear of the black turtlenecks I then purchased to look like John Lennon in Help! - and my continuing dedication to the guitar and my writing, but I have recently gone back to also playing the intense, technical violin that I so despised then, and I generally write about other topics now, and there hasn’t been a rebellious pull toward these things for years. But they made me feel so much, in the way that one’s first love is always wont to do, and they taught me so much too - about art, about love, about who I was, about who I could be. And for that, my heart will always skip a beat whenever I see 1 appear while I’m scrolling through my iTunes library. Love is all you need, indeed.
 |
| The album in question. (Source: thebeatles.com) |
Like a lot of those who fall in my age bracket, the ritual of buying one’s first album was not especially ceremonious for me. All I did was log onto my iPad, enter a redemption code for an iTunes card, and click the “download” button on the album that I coveted - no flipping through crates of vinyl while an eccentric record shop owner tells me that the one I just glanced past will totally change my life, no nervously approaching a shop assistant searching for a copy of what my best friend’s cool older sister has scribbled on a scrap of paper for me, not even a physical item to show my future children as I rant about how much better things were in my day. But then, the album in question still entirely changed the course of my life in a kind of mythical way, so I guess there’s this, and the following is the story of how it did just that.
For many years, I attended a typically upper-class, conservative school - and for some time, I didn’t mind this at all. I loved the straw boater hats and silver tie pins and modest tartan dresses we had to wear perfectly, and how we had to chorus ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ by heart at the end of every assembly. I liked the way our music programme consisted of proper string ensembles where we played Mozart and Beethoven, even in primary school, and how my violin teacher enrolled me in practical exams before I’d even hit my preteens; still yet, how our teachers called us “ladies”, how its events and assemblies and uniforms had barely changed in its near 100 years of existence, even how the uniform guide specified what kind of underwear we had to buy (black or navy blue in boyleg shape, for the curious!).
My home was not from that sort of world at all, so maybe I was kind of bewitched by the contrast to it afforded by the school’s traditionality and status symboling - and so, I found myself absorbing everything I could about it, trying to fit in with the litany of my classmates who thought that the sort of well-behaved, Stepford Wives-ian life promoted to us was the only proper path one could take in life. (Of course, this isn’t to say it was all bad. Once I hit high school I had some amazing teachers, and they taught me of some legitimately endearing qualities like work ethic and formal etiquette, and I think I found having things to quietly rebel against more invigorating and thrilling than perhaps I should have - not to mention I met my best friend there too!).
 |
| (Source: justinguitar.com) |
But then, when I was maybe ten or eleven, I heard The Beatles. This occured one morning in the Summer, when among the school’s more liberal teachers played ‘All You Need Is Love’ while the orchestra I was in packed up our equipment after a performance - and it wasn’t that I hadn’t heard The Beatles before, for how could I have grown up in a post-1960s world and not at least heard them in the distance on the radio, as muzak in the supermarket, their faces in the modern history documentaries on the arts channel on TV? I even knew the song in question, having considered Love, Actually to be my favourite movie the previous Christmas.
Perhaps the dramatic implications of my use of italics and short sentences in this section might puzzle you, for maybe you see The Beatles as kind of an omnipresent historical entity that you hear about in school, the music that your grandparents like. But I’d never actually listened to that song until this morning - and dearest reader, I beg you to remember the previous paragraph and, with such context, imagine just how alien and a single strum of a guitar would sound when you’ve been told from single digits that musical expression only becomes valid when it was written for aristocracy at least two centuries prior, that anything with lyrics and a beat is frivolous and beneath you, because I sure can’t use words to describe how I felt when I did.
I then discussed how cool I thought this song that I sort of knew was with my best friend at the time - also a member of said orchestra - as it played, and lo and behold, she informed me that she was already a massive Beatles fan! She introduced me to a whole new slew of their songs across the ensuing lunch periods, and I cannot adequately express just how much my little preteen heart ached with excitement, allure, passion, every time her iPod played a different track.
Of course, I adored the musicality of each - perhaps the reason why I fell in love with them instead of, say, The Rolling Stones or The Doors, was because their songs relied on many of the traditional musical elements that my classically-trained ears could relate to - but there was something kind of bizarrely rebellious about the way they strummed their guitars, the way they screamed about innocent desire and one’s relationship with the world, even in the way that John Lennon’s face made my heart beat faster (I would think of myself as so much more superior to the Justin Bieber fans with whom I shared a class, but really, were their declarations of love toward their pop demigod that different to my own feelings toward my beloved John?), and I loved that. I listened to these songs, and I realised that I had found a world in which I could belong, a world so much more exciting and beautiful and me than any that I’d known prior.
I listened to these songs, and I saw that I wasn’t at all like these people that I went to school with, that I was so fascinated by, with whom I wanted to fit in - I saw that I could never conform to the mild-mannered privilege with which we were expected to meld, that I simply wanted more for myself - and that maybe that was okay. And what adolescent - even one as unassuming I was then - doesn’t like being rebellious, right?
 |
| A younger me, with ‘John’ and ‘George’ from a tribute band! (Source: author’s own) |
Anyway, within a few months, I was wholeheartedly obsessed. I also found myself rather bored, the school musical I’d also had a lead role in and which had consumed most of my time that year thus far having wrapt up. During one such following aimless scroll through the Internet, I came across a greatest hits compilation on iTunes by the name of 1 with a hyperlink underneath that read “The Beatles” - and it occurred to me, I could buy this, I could listen to them whenever I pleased! So, I set about doing just this - but of course, it couldn’t be that simple. For some reason, I was entirely convinced without any basis whatsoever that my parents hated The Beatles, so I spent many a diary entry crafting a plan as to how I’d obtain this album.
I think the deal was to nonchalantly buy myself an iTunes card, to redeem this one carefully chosen afternoon with my mum in tow, and then to “randomly” come across the Beatles album and claim that I needed to buy a selection of the songs for my violin lessons, but wouldn’t it just be so much better if I got the whole album instead? Needless to say, my parents had no problem with my purchasing, and were probably pleased that I wanted to buy said album in place of, say, a Justin Bieber song or whatever was popular then - maybe I just invented this ploy to continue the rebellious racing in my heart I felt every time my friend and I sang their songs at the top of our lungs at school.
And I remember how I felt in the aftermath of that afternoon- how I wrote an entry in my diary that consisted pretty much entirely of scrambled capital letters, the sheer exhilaration that flooded me as I pressed play on ‘Penny Lane’, how I felt compelled to tell everyone I knew that I now had a Beatles album, how I went to a play the next day but I couldn’t concentrate because all I could think about were all the new songs that I’d just discovered. I loved them even more, to the point that I could barely sleep some nights, where I’d lie on the oval and draw a love heart around John Lennon’s and my initials in the dirt, where I’d sit on the couch every afternoon and daydream about them whisking me away to 1960s London, with this album constantly reverberating about my mind - I loved them, with the same kind of intensity that perhaps a less introverted preteen would her first date. Maybe that’s another reason why I adored them so - that they supplied me with the same innocent, beautiful rushing of the heart that their songs so often described, the joys of being a teenager that I desired and yet was too shy to ever find outside of my mind.
 |
| Said younger me in the throes of her Beatles obsession - and an ill-advised Lennon-esque haircut! (Source: author’s own) |
For many, it’s the album itself that is the peak - but in my case, it was only a small beginning, and for the next two or three years they were my whole world. The greatest hits collection on my iPad became Rubber Soul, and then a collection of first-edition vinyl pressings of each of their studio albums. I began to dream about being in a rock band of my own, so I started playing guitar, something that made me feel cool and transcendent and dangerous in its own right - for the classical music I’d been playing on violin had never been my music, but the joy I felt as the riffs slipped off my fingers told me that this was, and plus, what greater sin could a promising young soloist commit than picking up a rock instrument?
They inspired me to channel my love for them into the writing I’d always enjoyed creating, and hence, I published my personal blog a couple of years after the events of this article, with the appropriate name of All You Need is The Beatles. I went to my hairdresser with a picture of John Lennon circa Rubber Soul, and asked her to cut my bangs as such - and of course, this was a stylistic failure of monumental proportions, in my failing to realise that John Lennon’s hair was not thick and curly like my own, but I loved it at the time, and it made me feel interesting and different in a way that their music made me want to be.
I decided that I wanted to go to university, that I wanted to write, and make art, and most significantly, make brash, important music, things that I’d been too scared - or simply too unaware - to consider prior; I listened to each of their albums on repeat and repeat and repeat, until I’d memorised each brushing of the wrong guitar string and glitch with the recording technology. And, the dangerous, rebellious instinct I so loved them for inspiring in me turned out to be literally true, when a little while later, one of the school's music teachers called me aside before a solo performance in which I planned to play ‘In My Life’ on my violin and suggested that I “leave the popular music for home” - and as such, I only adored them even more, and their fierce, catchy passion only made me even more determined to pursue my dreams, my identity. I had a concept of who I was entirely of my own accord - I knew who I wanted to be, and I’d built this myself - and I can’t tell you how proud I was of this.
 |
| A picture of the Fab Four particularly beloved by me at the time of this article. (Source: thebeatles.com) |
I don’t listen to The Beatles much anymore, for when you’ve listened to something 400 times and you can recreate it entirely perfectly in your head, do you really need to? In fact, perhaps the only conspicuous evidence of such a phase in my life is my continual wear of the black turtlenecks I then purchased to look like John Lennon in Help! - and my continuing dedication to the guitar and my writing, but I have recently gone back to also playing the intense, technical violin that I so despised then, and I generally write about other topics now, and there hasn’t been a rebellious pull toward these things for years. But they made me feel so much, in the way that one’s first love is always wont to do, and they taught me so much too - about art, about love, about who I was, about who I could be. And for that, my heart will always skip a beat whenever I see 1 appear while I’m scrolling through my iTunes library. Love is all you need, indeed.
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