The Beatles are the most-covered artists of all time – and it’s not hard to see why. Their enduring cultural influence is just one aspect that makes the Fab Four arguably the greatest musical act of all time, having secured their place in the Hall of Fame – both literally and metaphorically. Their songs – many of which have stood the test of time and become the soundtrack to countless lives – are not to be overlooked.
If musical genius wasn’t enough, The Beatles’ success is supported by solid data. The four-piece band is considered the most successful musical act of all time, having sold a record-breaking 600 million albums worldwide. With 20 number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, the Liverpool legends’ generation-defining music revolutionised the industry and altered the course of music history.
Being the most successful artists of all time comes with its own benefits – one of them being everlasting relevance. Widely recognised as the most-covered artists of all time, The Beatles recorded nearly 200 original songs, providing a wealth of music for subsequent artists to choose from.
With iconic singles like Let It Be and Here Comes The Sun, it may come as a surprise then, that The Beatles’ most-covered song of all time is actually Yesterday, according to the Guinness Book of Records.
With more than 1,600 recorded versions, the song’s enduring popularity remains unparalleled. According to Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), Yesterday was performed over seven million times in the 20th century alone.
Although it was never released as a single in the UK, the song was voted the best of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of listeners and music experts. In 2000, Rolling Stone Magazine and MTV named it the greatest pop song of all time.
The Beatles’ and Paul McCartney’s biographers claim that the melody came to Sir Paul in a dream at his then-girlfriend Jane Asher’s Wimpole Street home. Upon waking, he rushed to the piano to play the tune, fearing he might forget it.
Concerned he had unintentionally plagiarised someone else’s work, Paul revealed: “For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it.”
During this time, John Lennon and Paul McCartney often used temporary working lyrics for their songs, with the initial title of this iconic track being “Scrambled Eggs”.
The humorous placeholder verse was: “Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs, not as much as I love scrambled eggs,” which was later replaced by more appropriate lyrics.
Discussing the song that would go on to break records, John Lennon remarked: “The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it. Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this one would come up. We almost had it finished. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn’t find the right title.
“We called it ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it became a joke between us. We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.”
Sir Paul McCartney later disclosed that the turning point for the song’s now-famous lyrics occurred during a trip to Portugal in 1965. He explained: “I remember mulling over the tune of Yesterday, and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse. I started to develop the idea … da-da da, yes-ter-day, sud-den-ly, fun-il-ly, mer-il-ly and Yes-ter-day, that’s good. All my troubles seemed so far away “It’s easy to rhyme those a’s: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there’s a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey. Sud-den-ly, and ‘b’ again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it.”