Everyone knows The Beatles, and usually if everyone knows about something, it gets a day. You’ve got everything from National Porridge Day (23rd of June) to World Lemur Day (30th of October). These days tend to fly under the radar, which is fair enough, you can’t celebrate everything everyday. Global Beatles Day, however, is a rare one which I think deserves some attention.

Global Beatles Day falls on this Thursday, June 25th and celebrates the band’s incredible musicianship and community building efforts. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were initially members of a band called The Quarrymen as teenagers. In 1960, George Harrison would join, the band would rename themselves to The Beatles and Ringo Starr would join. Just two years later, the Beatles would release their first single, Love Me Do, which hit number one in the US. This feat would cement the group in the global music scene and lay the foundation for their coming years of genre hopping and pioneering efforts in songwriting and production, influencing music for decades to come.

In their just 10 active years as a band, The Beatles released 13 albums across the genres of Rock and Roll, Folk Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Baroque Pop and Hard Rock, just to name a few. To put it into perspective, if The Beatles broke up today, their first album would’ve been released in 2019. 

The Beatles performing on BBC Our World, 25th June 1967.

So, why the 25th? On that day in 1967, The Beatles performed All You Need Is Love on the first ever international satellite television broadcast, BBC Our World, which saw over 400 million people tune in from 26 different countries. The event was a milestone displaying music’s power in bringing people together. In 2009, Beatles fan Faith Cohen believed that this event deserved global recognition, and thus, Global Beatles Day was born.

Coincidentally, it aligns with the 5th day of Eastside Radio’s Radiothon. The theme for this year’s Radiothon is Community + Radio = Love. This reflects the incredible work the Beatles did in bringing people together through music and continues the tradition within the Sydney community. You may have even heard a few Beatles songs on Eastside FM this week – they certainly have no shortage of love songs.

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