100: THE BEATLES
She Loves You/I’ll Get You (Parlophone, 1963)

I’M GOING to bow out of this list with the record that probably kick-started my fanatical, lifelong love of music in the first place.

She Loves You isn’t the first record I remember hearing – that dubious honour goes to Swinging On A Star by Big Dee Irwin – but it is the first one that filled me with an uncontainable joy. My family love to mortify me with tales of how, as a two-year-old, I used to try to clomp around the house in my 13-year-old brother’s Beatle boots, before jumping on to the furniture, shaking my head and bellowing ‘YEAH YEAH YEAH’ in a scurf-bedecked tribute to my beloved Fab Four.

Over the years, stories have filtered through about the way in which the media were supposedly complicit in ‘manufacturing’ Beatlemania as an antidote to the chilly grief which prevailed in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. This, however, conveniently fails to take into account the irresistible exuberance of the band’s music, the sly candour of their personalities and the ‘shock of the new’ which animated their every composition and utterance.

Having just finished reading the wonderfully vivid and informative book The Beatles In Scotland, I can readily attest to the fact that girls were screaming at The Beatles long before they became famous. Lennon’s myopic aggression, McCartney’s sloe-eyed winsomeness, Harrison’s cool drollery and Starr’s amiable stolidity proved to be a potent combination straight out of the box, and girls often found themselves unwittingly rending their own cardies and weeing on to their own shoes as The Beatles poured shards of living colour into a largely monochrome post-war world.

She Loves You is a stirring example of the way in which they tore up the rule book from the word go. Ringo tromps his kit into the floor, with the hoarse Hamburg cries of ‘mach schau!’ still fresh in his ears; Lennon and McCartney throw in the first of their many heart-stoppingly unexpected chord changes when they land on that gorgeous C minor in the chorus; and the very pages of history light up with those iconic yells of ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’...

I can’t think of a better way to end than to summon forth the spirit of such an exultant beginning. Stick on She Loves You even now, and it will save you all over again.