In 1963, The Beatles a force that remade pop, and Britain, in an instant. Sixty years on, their subversive spirit shines through the maelstrom of incandescent fans, outraged MPs and hyperbolic media. And their records weren’t bad, either. John Harris flips his (Beatle) wig all over again.

Shock of the new: in the front row at The Beatles’ 1963 Christmas Concert, Finsbury Park Astoria, London; (above) Paul McCartney and John Lennon get close.

Sharok Hatami/Shutterstock, David Magnus/Shutterstock

ON JUNE 26, 1963, EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE CUBAN Missile Crisis and less than two years since Berlin had been divided in two by an impenetrable wall, President John F. Kennedy made his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in the Schöneberg district of the old German capital.

In the UK, the Tory Secretar y of State for War John Profumo had just resigned, the result of a mounting scandal full of Cold War intrigue, which also starred a Russian Naval attaché, a model and showgirl named Christine Keeler, and the London osteopath and high-society mover Stephen Ward. By way of light relief, the Top 10 of the singles chart included Freddie And The Dreamers’ If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody, Ray Charles’s Take These Chains Off My Heart, and Deck Of Cards, a spoken-word Christian curio by a DJ from Tennessee called Wink Martindale.

Thanks to his command of the musical wave emanating from Liverpool, The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein was in the midst of an incredible run of success. The UK Number 1 was I Like It, by Epstein clients Gerry And The Pacemakers. After 10 weeks, The Beatles’ From Me To You was still at Number 2, with the version of the Lennon-McCartney song Do You Want To Know A Secret by Billy J. Kramer – another Epstein protégé – two places lower.

That day, The Beatles were in Newcastle, where they were about to perform at the Majestic Ballroom. Which hotel The Beatles stayed in has long been a matter of local controversy: some accounts pinpoint the city-centre Turks Head; others suggest it was the Imperial, in the suburb of Jesmond. It doesn’t much matter: the significance of that day was all about what happened some time after lunch, when John Lennon and Paul McCartney began writing the song that would set them on a completely new trajector y, freeing them from the clichés of ‘Merseybeat’, and propelling them somewhere completely unique.

McCartney would later remember “sitting on the bed in this hotel somewhere with John in the afternoon daylight.” According to Lennon, their starting point “was Paul’s idea: instead of singing ‘I love you’ again, we’d have a third party.” Indirect inspiration, said McCartney, came from Forget Him, a hit at the time for the Philadelphia-born singer Bobby Rydell. Their thoughts may also have been influenced by The Everly Brothers’ version of the 1930s song Temptation – aNumber 1 British hit two years before – and its refrain of “yay, yay, yay, yah.”

What they came up with, bolstered by a falsetto “Woo!” copied over from Twist And Shout, was titled She Loves You. Lennon seems to have been responsible for the bittersweet verses (“You think you’ve lost your love…”), while McCartney’s more upbeat instincts defined the bridge and chorus. They completed it soon after at Paul’s family home on Forthlin Road, in Liverpool – where his father Jim queried the song’s “yeah, yeah, yeah” refrain: “That’s ver y nice, son, but there’s enough of these Americanisms around. Couldn’t you sing ‘She loves you, yes, yes, yes?’”

The suggestion was politely rejected. On the face of it, the new song stuck with a winning formula: after Love Me Do, Please Please Me and From Me To You, more fun with romantic lyrics and personal pronouns. But it was actually a radical departure. As The Beatles’ lives moved at an ever-faster speed, She Loves You sounded like the essence of what was happening to them, full of a sudden sense of exhilaration and excitement. It was the perfect song to soundtrack the second half of 1963, and the arrival of what became known as Beatlemania: a 140-second prophecy that was coming true even as it was written.