At the dawn of the Summer of Love, Brian Epstein informed George Martin of his bold plans for the Beatles’ biggest audience ever. ‘He came to me and said, “Look, there’s an international hook-up with all nations and the Beatles have been chosen to represent it. We’d be doing a live broadcast to 200, 300 million people in every part of the globe.’”
A ‘party atmosphere’ was required, so, with time running out, Epstein instructed Tony Bramwell to gather suitably groovy stars for the next day’s live broadcast. Bramwell decided to trawl the most fashionable clubs: the Speakeasy, the Cromwellian, the Bag o’Nails, the Scotch of St James. In the Speakeasy he found Keith Moon hurling peanuts around, ‘absolutely stonkers’. Moon eagerly accepted the invitation, but turned down Bramwell’s suggestion that he should first get some rest: ‘If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just keep going.’
Bramwell found Mick Jagger in the Scotch of St James, and explained that the broadcast would be transmitted worldwide. Jagger’s casual acceptance – ‘No hassle’ – possibly concealed a degree of envy. ‘You couldn’t buy that kind of publicity,’ he said. Other clubs proved equally fruitful, with Eric Clapton and various Small Faces agreeing to turn up.
And so, on the afternoon of 25 June 1967, the beautiful people flowed into Studio One at Abbey Road: Jagger and Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Graham Nash of the Hollies, Gary Leeds of the Walker Brothers. In line with Royal Ascot, which was running simultaneously, many attendees had gone to some fuss with their clothes, not least Paul, who had stayed up all night applying psychedelic patterns to his shirt. Ringo wore a suit tailored for him by Simon and Marijke from the Dutch design group The Fool, while Eric Clapton arrived with his hair freshly permed, a striking new advance in male grooming.
Watching film of the broadcast of ‘All You Need is Love’ is like finding the Summer of Love in a grain of sand. It starts with trumpeters from the thirteen-strong orchestra, in regulation dinner jacket and black tie, blasting out ‘La Marseillaise’. Paul choruses ‘Love, love, love’ sitting cross-legged on a high stool, a red flower sticking out of the headphone on his left ear. The cellists have their eyes glued to their sheet music. How do they feel about being plunged into this brave new world of free love, its music so different from their own? Do these serious musicians, these men of gravitas, resent having to kowtow to a bunch of stoned hippies, or are they exhilarated at being allowed into this magical universe where there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done?
John has one hand pressed on the headphone over his left ear, his eyes closed, his glasses a third of the way down his nose, two flowers sprouting from the top of his head with another popping up from his forehead like a miner’s torch. He offhandedly chews gum as he sings ‘Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game’. He appears unruffled by the idea of singing to 350 million viewers worldwide, but at the same time intent on the job in hand: he doesn’t look around, or acknowledge the audience. Tony Bramwell said later that John was ‘wired and speeding’, but he gives a good impression of insouciance.
And so to the violin quartet, sitting in a circle, bespectacled and studious, one with a bald head bobbing in a sea of hair. The lead violinist, Sidney Sax, is fifty-four in a roomful of twenty-somethings; he also played on ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’.
The camera moves to a tape-machine, whirling around, then to a wider shot of the studio, decorated with flowers galore and, to add to the illusion of a children’s party, hundreds of brightly coloured balloons. Aha! There’s Paul’s brother Mike, sitting on the floor close to John’s knees, looking bored, or stoned, or possibly a bit of both. We see George for the first time, in red flares, fur coat and moustache, and there at the back the reassuring figure of Ringo, dependable as a bookend, chugging away on his drums, acting the hippy in a purple silk jacket with beads all over the place, but, despite the effort, still the obliging bus conductor.
Back to the beefy brass section, and the olden days. They are led by David Mason, forty-one, a professor at the Royal College of Music. Back in 1958 he played the flugelhorn at the premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Ninth Symphony, conducted by Malcolm Sargent, in the presence of the composer.1 Vaughan Williams – pupil of Ravel, friend of Holst – was then eighty-five years old, and just three weeks from death. For the first ten years of his life he had known his great-uncle, Charles Darwin. When the young Ralph had asked his mother about On the Origin of Species, she told him: ‘The Bible says that God made the world in six days. Great-Uncle Charles thinks it took longer; but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way.’ From Charles Darwin to John Lennon in just three handshakes: the Beatles concertina time in the most extraordinary way.2
The studio is packed with so much stuff that it has an air of the set of Steptoe and Son: people remember the cameramen puncturing the spirit of love and peace with curses as they got caught up in all the odds and ends. In the background, a string puppet has four lettered balloons – L, O, V and E – attached to its head.
Many members of the audience stare into space, looking either bored or cool: in those days, it was hard to tell the difference. Mick Jagger sits to the front, facing away from the camera, two huge embroidered eyes staring out of the back of his jacket. Throughout, there are glimpses of oddities: as John sings ‘All you need is love’ for the umpteenth time, the camera floats to a bald man in a white shirt and black trousers, looking mildly cheesed-off, as though he’s waiting to lock up. Seconds later, as John sings ‘It’s eea-seey!’ someone who looks like Princess Margaret spins into view. Might she have been there? This was the Summer of Love, when the world went topsy-turvy: anything was possible.3 In August, the EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood was received by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. ‘The Beatles are turning awfully funny, aren’t they?’ she said to him.
For some reason, George barely merits a look-in, and is not filmed at all during his brief guitar solo, once voted the fifth-worst of all time. Then the coda gets under way, the orchestra zipping through George Martin’s masterly mish-mash of Bach, ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘In the Mood’, and the audience claps sluggishly along; Mick Jagger gives up halfway between claps. Where are the other members of the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, who were said to be there? I must have watched the video twenty-five times or more, but I still haven’t caught sight of them.
Towards the end, five Beatle apparatchiks parade on, sandwich boards bearing the slogan ‘All You Need is Love’ in different languages hanging from their necks. They form a small, uncomfortable circle, like children forced into an Easter Parade. Tony Bramwell’s board reads ‘LOVE LOVE LOVE’, and Alistair Taylor’s ‘LOVE ЛЮБОV AMOR AMORE’. Earlier in the day Taylor had been forced into a psychedelic shirt by Paul McCartney, who thought his usual office attire too square. Towards the back, someone holds a sign saying ‘COME BACK MILLY’, a personal message to one of Paul’s aunts, away in Australia visiting her son and grandchildren.
As the song draws to a close, John and Paul start singing ‘She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah,’ which they first released just four years earlier, but which now breaks through the hippy fog like a hymn to lost youth.
And what of ‘All You Need is Love’? Some Beatles purists find it too banal, its lyrics an odd mix of truisms – ‘Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung’ – and untruisms – ‘nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be’, the whole thing too mushy and meaningless and contradictory to be taken seriously.
Ian MacDonald describes it as ‘one of the Beatles’ less deserving hits’, adding that it ‘owes more of its standing to its local historical associations than to its inspiration’. For him, it was sloppy and slapdash: ‘Drug-sodden laziness was half the problem.’ His argument was as much with the zeitgeist as with the song that expressed it: the idea that anything worthwhile can be attained without effort – it’s ea-seey – and that every single person, however dull and droopy, can count himself an artist.
Yet at the same time, ‘All You Need is Love’ captures the zeitgeist like no other song, which is perhaps why it is loved by such a wide range of people: the boxer George Foreman, the comedy actress Penelope Keith, the dancer Wayne Sleep and the racing driver Jackie Stewart all chose it as a Desert Island Disc. When he was Home Secretary in the mid-1990s, Michael Howard used to play the Beatles in his government car. He considers ‘All You Need is Love’ ‘perhaps the quintessential record of the sixties’. On the other side of the Atlantic, Al and Tipper Gore played it at their 1970 wedding. In 2005 John’s transcription of the verse, which he used as a crib at the recording, sold for $1 million at auction.
Brian Epstein seemed at his happiest and most relaxed that day. It was, he declared, the best thing the Beatles had ever done: ‘It’s a wonderful, beautiful, spine-chilling song.’ He attended the session in an open-necked shirt and black velvet suit, looking unusually carefree. Maybe the song said everything he was too tortured to express. He could look through the window at the utopia beyond, but the window itself remained firmly closed. No one you can save that can’t be saved; except for Brian. On that day, he had nine weeks left to live.
1 He also played the flugelhorn on ‘Penny Lane’.
2 Around this time Paul discussed Vietnam with Bertrand Russell, who remembered childhood meetings with William Gladstone; Gladstone himself used to breakfast with the elderly William Wordsworth (b.1770). So it’s ‘Blackbird’ to ‘Daffodils’ in three meetings. Russell’s grandfather, the Victorian prime minister Lord John Russell, visited Napoleon in exile on Elba. So, if you’d prefer, you can leap from Paul McCartney to Bertrand Russell to Lord John Russell to the Emperor Napoleon in just three bounds.
3 In April 1969 Princess Anne, wearing a navy-blue trouser suit, joined other audience members to dance onstage at the hippy musical Hair. ‘The eighteen-year-old Princess broke into a hipswinging routine, flinging her arms in abandon,’ observed the Daily Telegraph.