The Fab Four’s impact on guitar music is hard to overstate, but what are their best moments of on-record guitar brilliance? We’ve picked out our top 20.
“We were just a band that made it very, very big. That’s all.” Was John Lennon’s myth-busting synopsis of The Beatles’ story, uttered during an interview with Rolling Stone. While the technical truth of that statement is inarguable, for millions around the world, The Beatles were – and remain – a huge deal more than just another band. From that first fabled meeting of John Lennon and Paul McCartney at the Woolton Village Fete in July 1957 to the spontaneous final rooftop performance atop Apple Corps’ Savile Row HQ at the culmination of the 1960s, The Beatles became one of the most seismic forces ever to impact popular culture.
Narrowing down The Beatles’ greatest guitar moments isn’t just about honing in on technical nouse; this is also a showcase of the range of experimentation the four enthusiastically pursued, to the benefit of all who listened. The Beatles moved the goalposts in terms of what a pop song could be, and proved eternally wrong one Dick Rowe of Decca Records, who airily dismissed the four, and their manager Brian Epstein, on the cusp of their success with the catastrophic misjudgement that ‘guitar groups are on their way out’.” Ironically, The Beatles’ shattering of pop’s parameters instead proved that ‘guitar groups’ could outgrow such tired labels, and shape a more musically expansive future.
