When I was in my early twenties, and on the dole, I had a friend who worked on the barely-remembered Mike Smith TV quiz ‘That’s Showbusiness’. I sometimes used to go down to recordings at the BBC on Oxford Road in Manchester to avail myself of the sparkling white wine and crudites in the green room.

Mike McGear, formerly of the band The Scaffold (’Lily the Pink’) was at one of these recordings. I was beside myself with excitement: Mike is the brother of Paul McCartney. I felt that this was going to be my own tenuous-connection-to-a-Beatle story; that I stood in the same room as Paul’s brother.

Since being at One Golden Square, I’ve been lucky enough to meet Paul about ten times. There’s always a tornado of chaos around him, with him being cool, calm and charming in the eye of the storm. This week was no exception - the flurry of emails about the state of the lavatory speaks for itself.

I was asked for a ‘blog post about Paul McCartney week, but you’re probably sick to death of hearing about it on the speakers in the office. As far as tidbits go, all I can tell you is that he’s a lovely man who really likes a biscuit.

If The Beatles’ music is special to you, then you already know why it’s such a big deal for Macca to come in. If The Beatles do little or nothing for you, then you either have no soul, or you haven’t reached your road to Damascus moment yet.

To help you with your conversion, I’ve dug out a piece I was asked to write a while ago about my love affair with The Beatles. It’s very long and self-indulgent, so I don’t expect anybody to persevere past the first couple of paragraphs. Also, like anyone telling you about a love affair, it’s probably a bit sickly. Here is my testimony:

I can’t remember the first time I heard the Beatles’ music. I was born three years after the band had split up, and my memories start at around the time Punk came along to smash everything which went before it, yet the Beatles’ songs seem to have always been part of my consciousness.

My parents didn’t have a cool record collection; I don’t think there was even one Beatles LP or single. The wire racks next to the music centre in our house contained a mawkish selection; Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Honey’, a widow’s lament/horticultural ballad, Peter Sarstedt’s rags to riches ‘Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?’ (notable for its use of manic ‘ha-ha-ha’ laughter to complete one particular line, in lieu of actual lyrics which scan.) It’s odd that given the prevalence of songs-which-tell-a-story, there was no room in my parents’ collection for the kitchen sink melancholy of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or the vivid Victoriana of ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’.

The Beatles songs that are hardwired into my memory are ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. The former has long since joined the ranks of nursery rhyme, so it’s easy to work out how that one got itself in there.

The latter was recorded over a decade before my brain became cognisant, but is such a template for perfect pop that it still blared out of the transistor radio, towering over the hits of the day. People often love the songs they fell in love to: ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ is the soundtrack to the world falling in love with The Beatles.

The first time I remember being aware of The Beatles as an entity was in primary school. We didn’t have any teachers with musical fingers, so a wild-haired, elbow-patched old local man called Mr. Cutbush came in to play piano for us once a week. One of the songs we sang or blew our descant recorders along to was ‘When I¹m Sixty Four’.

I remember seeing ‘Words and Music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney’ at the top of the sheet music, and thinking about two friends crafting a song, one sitting at a piano, and the other scribbling away. I remember singing about the Isle of Wight, and a drunken man coming home late to an angry wife, and scrimping and saving; and feeling that for the first time the words in the song were things from real life, instead of hallelujahs and sea shanties. Even the words ‘Published by Northern Songs’ felt warm to me, growing up in the north of England. That song felt like something I could touch.

Sometime later, there was an episode of the TV show ‘Fame’ in which Little Jimmy Osmond guest-starred as a mentally challenged student. He pitched the role somewhere between Benny from ‘Crossroads’ and The Elephant Man. During the show, he gave performance of ‘Penny Lane’ that displayed a similar kind of sensitivity to that in his dramatic work. Fortunately I was too young to notice I was witnessing a massacre, and again I was thrilled to hear such everyday things as kids on street corners and barbers and fish fingers being mentioned in a song. I’ve been predisposed to melancholy since childhood (blame ‘Peanuts’ cartoons and Moomin books), and I sensed an attractive strangeness in the pretty nurse who feels as if she’s in a play, but is anyway.

Once I started to buy records, The Beatles were off my radar. Cool adolescents bought singles they’d read about in their older brothers’ NME, or old Velvet Underground LPs from second-hand shops. The rest bought songs they’d heard on the radio chart show or Saturday morning TV from the Top 40 display in Woolworths. Lou Reed was conspicuous by his absence from my little hotch-potch collection of records I’d heard on Piccadilly Radio.

Our music teacher at secondary school was a glamorous, slight, greying cat-like lady called Mrs. Frenz. She was from Stockport, but spoke in a similar mid-Atlantic drawl to Lulu. If we, as a class, needed to distract her from the business of teaching us about baroque string quartets or the Pentatonic scale, we¹d get her talking about the Swinging Sixties.

‘Wow!’ she’d say, tossing her head to one side and giving a French-style open shrug, ‘The Sixties were really something else!’

And then she’d be off for a good half hour.

Her reminiscing invariably led to The Beatles. She would sit with her head propped on her folded arms on top of the modern upright piano, and try to convey to us how the whole of rock and roll took a quantum leap forwards when The Beatles came along, sometimes illustrated with impromptu reproductions of riffs on the keyboard.

At the time, I didn’t get it: I could hear that The Beatlemania-era songs were fantastic, exuberant pop, but I couldn’t put that much space between them and the other catchy oldies records I’d hear on the radio.

I gradually became more familiar with the odd Beatles song here and there: I started up my own mobile disco and saw that ‘Twist and Shout’ would fill a dancefloor. I learned ‘Let It Be’ on the piano, knowing that it¹s always good to have a singalong up your sleeve for a party piece. My first girlfriend and I would listen to her mum’s old copy of ‘Rubber Soul’, and in particular ‘Nowhere Man’ which in my mind came to represent her suburban, Daily Mail-reading, Sunday car-washing dad.

It was a nasty and unfair judgement, probably born out of resentment at him for not letting us hormonal teenagers share a bed when I stayed over, but nonetheless that song gave me a mast to nail my colours to. I heard it as striking a blow against conformers and mediocrity, and when George Harrison’s lead guitar burst in after the first verse, it sounded to me like all of the world¹s promise and possibility distilled into fourteen seconds.

It still does.

When I was eighteen, I began to work at a local radio station. Thrown in at the deep end on a radio station which broadcast a huge range of music from the previous three decades, I had to quickly familiarise myself with the rock and pop music canon. The Beatles’ songs, both individually and as part of a catalogue, seemed brighter, or 3D, or Technicolor compared to even the greatest records.

One day my boss, Neil, was opening his post. He held up a CD and asked if I’d ever heard it. It was a reissue of John Lennon¹s first solo album, ‘Plastic Ono Band’. I said that I hadn’t, and Neil insisted that I found myself somewhere quiet and listened to it straight away. I found a small, barely used editing booth, put the disc into a player and turned up the speakers.

I don’t know how long I stayed in there for, I’m guessing it was between two and three hours. I had to listen to it over and over. The album is from a tough time in Lennon’s life; The Beatles had just split up and their affairs were poisoned with acrimony, his relationship with Yoko Ono was intense and they shared a siege mentality, together they were fighting heroin addiction and had just undergone a programme of Arthur Janov’s new Primal (Scream) Therapy.

John Lennon’s catharsis on ‘Plastic Ono Band’ didn’t match very much in my experiences of the world, but I’d never heard such honesty in a record. For the first time, music clicked with me as an expression of the human condition; my soul recognised another’s, baring itself through time from 1970. Hearing and responding to the rawness of that album changed the way in which I heard music forever. It changed from something enjoyable, but superficial, to my deepest and truest love.

From then onwards, I immersed myself in The Beatles. I got hold of the then deleted red and blue ‘Best Of’ compilations. My friend Chris had a lesser-known brown one, made up of love songs. I was living in a bedsit with very little money, but each week bought a new Beatles album on CD. I would listen to that album non-stop all week, learning its songs and its subtleties, flitting between losing myself in the music, and listening hard, contextualising it.

‘Revolver’ was the first one that I bought. I’d read in a magazine that the critics had hailed it the best. I obsessed over the end-of-a-relationship lament, ‘For No One’, wishing that I could meet a girl and have our love die out so that I could feel that kind of melancholy. The driving rhythms of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Taxman’ and ‘She Said, She Said’ hypnotised me as I learned to find my way around cheap red wine. I learned the hard way that Beatles LPs don’t function well as seduction soundtracks, especially here with Ringo singing ‘Yellow Submarine’ (whatever its merits as a psychadelic singalong.)

After I’d bought all of the albums, I began to read voraciously about The Beatles, wanting to consume every bit of information available on what inspired the songs, and how these amazing records came to be. I pored over Mark Lewinsohn’s ‘Complete Beatles Recording Sessions’ as devotedly as a pilgrim studying scripture. Every time I found out how a certain sound or effect had been made, I felt like an amateur magician suddenly privy to the lofty secrets of the Magic Circle.

The story of The Beatles became romantic to me; the chance meetings and trailblazing and loves and friendships and great leaps forwards and the slow deterioration. I’d travel across the city to record fairs and boot sales, where I’d search for bootleg outtake recordings and VHS copies of out-of-circulation films and performances. When ‘The Beatles Anthology’ documentary aired on TV in the mid-nineties, it was to me like ‘The World at War’ had been to my father.

Beatles songs became the score to life¹s moments. If ‘Day Tripper’ or ‘Come Together’ was played in an indie disco, I would flail around freely (albeit unrhythmically), without fear of making a spectacle of myself in front of girls I was unsuccessfully trying to attract.

One time, after a long night out in Manchester city centre, my friend Chris and I were on the top deck of the notorious 192 night bus. We’d been in a club called The Brickhouse, and the DJ had ended on ‘Hey Jude’. A little drunken and emotional, we sat at the front of the bus, singing this to ourselves. The guy behind joined in. Then the guy across the aisle. Then a couple of Goth girls a way back. Then another drunken gang up the back. By the time we got to our stop just after the McVities biscuit factory, the whole bus was singing the Na-Na-Nas. That was special.

The Beatles have provided me with so many moments like those. Falling in love to ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. Feeling like George Harrison’s demo recording of ‘All Things Must Pass’ saved my life on a dark night of the soul. Sometimes the beauty of the sound of a song I’ve heard hundreds of times can unexpectedly move me to tears; the cello counterpoint to the third verse of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, the nervous young boys on the brink of something which would change their lives and 20th century pop culture on ‘Love Me Do’, the beauty of the-greatest-band-that-ever-was ending the last album they recorded with a song (called ‘The End’ What else?) which encompasses the message of their career and that of the Sixties.

I sometimes worry that I’ll grow out of The Beatles. I’ll be in a phase where I’m listening to a lot of, say, Tom Waits or Nina Simone, and I’ll wonder if The Beatles will sound immature or insubstantial by comparison.

Then I put on Revolver, or Abbey Road, and they never do.

I think back to my music teacher, Mrs Frenz, explaining to us just how The Beatles blew everything apart, and now, having listened and studied, I understand - at least intellectually. But I would give anything to be thirteen years old in 1962, and to follow The Beatles’ story from the off, as it unfolded, hearing all that incredible music, in context, with fresh ears.

To have been listening to balladeers, like Franke Ifield singing ‘I Remember’ on Radio Luxembourg, and then to hear it followed by a new single, ‘Love Me Do’ by The Beatles. To have been enthralled by these voices and beats which sounded so unlike what surrounded them, to have followed ‘Please Please Me’ up the hit parade, and then been itching to go out and buy the LP of the same name the day it was released – to take that LP home, remove it from its cardboard sleeve and dust jacket and place it onto the turntable, eagerly taking the arm of the record player, carefully placing the needle onto the run-in groove, a couple of seconds popping and hiss before the first track, (’I Saw Her Standing There’ according to the sleeve, which I’d be intently studying), and to have heard that song, for the very first time, storm in with McCartney’s confident ‘1-2-3-4!’