Or, ‘Why the Beatles followed the sun‘

Who loves the sun? A wise man called Doug Yule once asked that question, and you’d be hard pressed to find a better answer than the Beatles. In their first interview after returning from a Beatlemanic America, the Liverpudlians couldn’t help but reminisce on the Miami sun. ‘I think I enjoyed the sun in Miami most of all,’ said George Harrison, with Ringo adding, ‘I just loved all of it, you know. Especially Miami – the sun. I didn’t know what it meant till I went over there.’

The other three must have known what it meant, using it frequently some of their best-loved songs. Titularly, there’s ‘Here Comes The Sun’, ‘Sun King’, and ‘Good Day Sunshine’, but casual mentions of the sun pervade almost all their albums. The fool on the hill ‘sees the sun going down’; Lucy is the ‘girl with the sun in her eyes’.

Culturally, the sun was an important symbol for hippy culture. The summer of 1967 has been coined the ‘Summer of Love’, where hippies and beatniks converged on San Francisco for a season of spiritualism. To those free lovers, the sun was a source of positive energy, of life and virility that grew the flowers on their burnt scalps. In Hindu and Buddhist texts, it was the deity Surya, described in the Mahabharata as the ‘eye of the universe, soul of all existence, origin of all life’. The Beatles are inextricably linked to this context, having released Sgt. Pepper in late May 1967 and travelling to an Indian ashram in February 1968.

Beyond the obvious cultural markers, the sun is important for the Beatles in its own right; after all, ‘I’ll Follow The Sun’ was on 1964’s Beatles for Sale. On writing that song, McCartney said, ‘I wrote that in my front parlour in Forthlin Road. I was about 16. ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’ was one of those very early ones. I seem to remember writing it just after I’d had the flu and I had that cigarette. I remember standing in the parlour, with my guitar, looking out through the lace curtains of the window, and writing that one.’

At the other end of the band’s time together, take ‘Here Comes the Sun’, bursting from a ‘long, cold, lonely winter’. It was written after Harrison had essentially quit the Beatles, the pressures of his personal exacerbating the relentlessness of the band’s business commitments. Escaping to Eric Clapton’s garden, he started the song on one of Clapton’s acoustic guitars, finishing it on a holiday to Sardinia. ‘It seems as if winter in England goes on forever,’ Harrison wrote in his autobiography. ‘By the time spring comes, you really deserve it.’

The Beatles themselves embodied this exuberance and cheerfulness. They built a culture-defining fanbase through their wisecracking interviews and cheeky personalities. Although their songwriting sometimes err on the darker side of rock, sunless songs like ‘Lovely Rita’ and ‘All You Need Is Love’ carry a youthful optimism through its bombast and whimsy, defining a generation and inspiring countless others. ‘Origin of all life’ may be a bit strong, but their legacy and importance to popular music cannot be denied. The Beatles followed the sun, from the Quarrymen to Abbey Road, and led us all into its vital rays.