Paul McCartney explains the importance of one song to The Beatles early success

A song released early into The Beatles‘ career proved crucial to the band’s success, according to band member Paul McCartney.

The veteran songwriter explained that when the band breached the United States, it was all thanks to one song they decided to perform during one of their biggest televised appearances. While the group would perform twice at Shea Stadium in the aftermath, it was the decision to perform a song only just written by the group during an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that would propel the band to megastardom. The song was chosen, McCartney claims, because it had always been received well by audiences, and it was enough to tip the balance for the band when they travelled to the US.

Writing in his book, The Lyrics, McCartney shared how All My Loving had been crucial in securing The Beatles a spot in American rock and roll history.

He wrote: “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 on 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 Empire circuit to conquering America in a little over six months, and a few months later I turned twenty-two.”

The Let It Be hitmaker would go on to say the performance was a great way for the band to introduce themselves to audiences in the US. McCartney wrote: “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.

“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.