WE WERE ON A PACKAGE TOUR, WITH PROBABLY FIVE or six other bands, because one act was not enough to sell tickets. Even in New York, a show would have Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Fats Domino, The Everly Brothers – all on the same bill!

So I was on a tour bus somewhere in the UK, with nothing to do, and I started to think of these words: ‘Close your eyes . . .’ Although we’d met at this point, I don’t know that I was thinking specifically of Jane Asher when I wrote this, though we were courting. It’s probably more of a reflection on what our lives were like then – leaving behind family and friends to go on tour and experience all these new adventures. It’s one of the few songs I’ve written where the words came first. That almost never happens, I usually have an instrument with me. So, I’d started work on the lyrics on the bus, and back then we were playing what was known as the Moss Empires circuit. The Moss Empires company owned a number of venues across the country, which would be some of the stops on the tour. They were these large, gorgeous turn-of-the-century music halls, but nowadays most of them are bingo halls. These places had really nice, big, empty backstage areas, and I remember we were on a package tour with Roy Orbison, and we arrived at the venue, and with all the hustle and bustle around me – all the various bands and tour crews and stagehands running about – I made my way to a piano and then somehow found the chords. At that point, it was a straight country-and-western love song.

The Beatles during their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. New York, 9 February 1964

With songwriting, you conceive of it in one genre (because you can’t conceive of things in thousands of genres), and you have one way of hearing it. If you get it right, however, you realise it has a certain elasticity; songs can be flexible. And when other members of The Beatles would get into the studio, often that’s when that elasticity would kick in.

The thing that strikes me about the ‘All My Loving’ recording is John’s guitar part; he’s playing the chords as triplets. That was a last-minute idea, and it transforms the whole thing, giving it momentum. The song is obviously about someone leaving to go on a trip, and that driving rhythm of John’s echoes the feeling of travel and motion. It sounds like a car’s wheels on the motorway, which, if you can believe it, had only really become a thing in the UK at the end of the fifties. But, it was often like that when we were recording. One of us would come up with that little magic thing. It allowed the song to become what it needed to be.

It’s a letter song, of course, in the same vein as the epistolary song ‘P.S. I Love You’, which was the B-side of ‘Love Me Do’. It’s part of a tradition of letter songs like Fats Waller’s ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’ or Pat Boone’s 1956 hit ‘I’ll Be Home’. So, ‘All My Loving’ is a song that has a lineage.

‘All My Loving’ has somewhat of a lineage within the story of The Beatles too. It was recorded in the summer of 1963 and ended up on our second album, With The Beatles, released later that same year. At least, it was on With The Beatles in the UK. In the US the song came out on Meet The Beatles! in early 1964. At the beginning of our career, up until around the time of Help!, the US albums were different to the ones in the UK. Capitol used to take a few songs from here, a few from there, and add in a single or two, and that would be the US album. But what’s great about With The Beatles and Meet The Beatles! is that they both have the same photo by Robert Freeman on the cover

Bob had worked with some really cool jazz musicians, like John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, and we’d shown him some of our favourite photos taken of the band by our friend Astrid Kirchherr back in the Hamburg days. We asked Bob to keep that kind of style, and if you look at Astrid’s photos of us you can definitely see the influence. I get asked about that cover a fair bit, and people are often surprised to hear how quickly it was done. It looks like it was taken in a studio with professional lighting to achieve those shadows, but the photo was actually taken in a hotel corridor in Bournemouth, a seaside town on the south coast of England. We were over there to play a string of shows at the Odeon Cinema, and Bob came to our hotel and was given an hour to get the cover. He set up a row of chairs and tried a few different arrangements – some with John at the front, some with me or George. But it was all done very quickly and with natural light. That photograph has become pretty iconic now, so we were pleased it was on the cover of both releases.

These albums came out at a time when Beatlemania was in full swing. A young lady in Washington, DC, had contacted her local radio station, asking them to play ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. I think they had to ship a copy in from England at that point, but they put it on, and I think they even had her introduce the record on their station. That kick-started everything, and the song went to number one a few weeks later. We’d always said that we didn’t want to go to America until we had a number one record, and here it was. So all that led to our first trip there.

There were crazy scenes at London Airport when we took off with a thousand-odd fans and the press waving us off and wishing us well. Cynthia, John’s wife, mistook the screams for the sound of a plane. The scenes were even crazier on our arrival at JFK. At the time I don’t think it necessarily occurred to us, but the airport had only recently been renamed after Kennedy. Our trip was only a few months after his assassination – which happened on the same day as the release of With The Beatles in the UK – and, though it’s not for me to say, people have written that the country, especially teenagers, had been looking for something new and positive and fun to latch onto after mourning his death. It’s one possible explanation for why Beatlemania took off so quickly in the US.

Capitol Records, our US label, had gone on a publicity drive to make sure people knew we were coming, and did they ever. We were met in New York by five thousand screaming fans and a hundred police officers trying to cordon them off. There’s a film of a press conference we gave right after stepping off the plane, and you can see just how out of control it all was.

A couple of weeks after the release of Meet The Beatles!, we played The Ed Sullivan Show. Ed Sullivan was a real gentleman to us, and he always wore these finely tailored suits. There were only three major channels in the US at the time, and his show defined what people talked about. You hadn’t made it in America until you’d been on it. We’d heard that some of our heroes, like Buddy Holly and The Crickets, had performed on the show, and there was that story about how they’d let Elvis Presley back on after performing ‘Hound Dog’, but he had to be shown from the waist up.

Our first appearance has now become sort of mythical in the story of The Beatles. Just before it aired, we received a telegram from Elvis Presley, wishing us well. I’d nearly done well at school; then Elvis came along, and school was all but forgotten, and here he was saying good luck to us. Then there was the sound of the audience, which is still ringing in my ears. The show had received something like fifty thousand applications for the seven hundred studio tickets. When the show aired, seventy-three million people watched us, and it became a cultural marker. So many people have come up to me through the years to tell me they watched it. People like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Chrissie Hynde, Billy Joel – they’d all seen it. It’s probably not true, but the story goes that the crime rate went down too; even the robbers were tuning in. It was such a great way for us to be introduced to the US. During our second song, ‘Till There Was You’, they cut to shots of each of us and put our names up on the screen. When they got to John, they added, ‘Sorry girls, he’s married’ – which had been a badly kept secret up until that point.

Some of the press the next day were a bit mean, though. The New York Herald Tribune – who, I might add, are no longer with us – wrote that The Beatles were ‘75 percent publicity, 20 percent haircut, and 5 percent lilting lament’. But then the ‘mop top’ became a whole new trend in the way that teenage boys started to wear their hair. At that point, the fringe – or bangs, as they’re called in the US – wasn’t supposed to go anywhere near the eyebrows. That all changed. You could even buy Beatles wigs.

The Ed Sullivan Show brings us back to ‘All My Loving’. The song had always done well live, so after he’d introduced us as ‘these youngsters from Liverpool’, it became the first song that America saw The Beatles play live on TV. A month or so afterwards we had the top five songs in the Billboard charts.

So to illustrate how quickly things were moving for us in those days, ‘All My Loving’ helped us go from the Moss Empires circuit to conquering America in a little over six months. And a few months later I turned twenty-two.