Someone recently said to me that the Beatles were overrated. Now, I have no problem with people saying they don’t like the Beatles – musical taste is subjective, and we like what we like – but that’s very different to saying they weren’t good, or that they are overrated. You can recognise someone to be talented without personally enjoying their work, and if that’s where you stand on the Beatles, I can respect that (though be warned, I’ll do so with a patronising degree of sympathy for what you’re missing out on). But overrated? No. Just no.

Familiarity has dulled the impact that the Beatles had. Bruce Springsteen has talked about hearing I Want To Hold Your Hand on the radio for the first time, how it was the Beatles that made Bruce – and countless others like him – want to form a band. America opened its arms to the Beatles, and other British acts, such as The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin swept in behind them, turning the tide on the one-way flow of pop music across the Atlantic and establishing a reciprocal relationship for the first time. The Beatles gave British music a credibility that it had never before enjoyed in America, with countless British acts – and American teenagers – benefitting ever since.

Aside from opening up the lucrative American market, before the Beatles there was no expectation for bands to write their own material, now it’s an exception if they don’t. Before the Beatles, pop careers burned brightly and briefly, finding something that sold, sticking with it until your audience grew up or moved on to the next flavour of the month. Lennon and McCartney initially assumed that sooner or later they would have to switch their focus to writing songs for other people; George Harrison was quoted in 1963 as saying he thought the Beatles still had a couple more years in them. The idea of bands staying together for 20 years (or 30, or 40, or more) was inconceivable, and the reason for the change was the way the Beatles expanded their own work over time. Previously there was little concept of a band growing and developing, changing their style and taking their audience with them. The Beatles may not have lasted as a unit for as long as the Rolling Stones, but it was their refusal to remain frozen in time as cute poppy moptops that made it possible for other bands to stay together and make music their life’s work.

The Beatles pushed boundaries and reimagined what was possible artistically, and that experimentation opened doors that others could walk through. The Beatles had to find ways to do things that hadn’t been done before, and in the process they invented recording techniques that subsequently became commonplace. They thought the unthinkable and made it happen. It wasn’t so much that they opened the door for everyone who followed (although they undoubtedly did), it was that they hacked out a door in what was previously an immovable solid wall. It wasn’t just that no one had gone there before them, no one else had even realised that there was a ‘there’ to go to. They were visionaries and trail-blazers who made possible everything that followed.

But there’s more even than that. The Beatles didn’t only change the music industry; they changed the world as well. Clive James described them as giving art back to the people at a time when every thinking man had decided that the people could never have art again. Mikhael Gorbachov said that ‘more than any ideology, more than any religion, more than Vietnam or any war or nuclear bomb, the single most important reason for the diffusion of the Cold War was… the Beatles.’ They helped lay the foundation for some of the most significant geopolitical shifts of the late 20th Century.

They changed our understanding of ourselves too. John Higgs’ fascinating book Love and Let Die starts with the coincidence that James Bond and the Beatles were born as cultural forces on the same day – 6th October 1962 marked the release of the first Beatles single, Love Me Do, as well as the first James Bond film Dr No – and goes on to present them as two contrasting, opposing visions of masculinity and Britishness. Bond embodied a model of manhood common in post-war Britain: he fought, he was brave and would risk his life for his country. He was also reactionary and emotionally distant – cold and somehow above emotions. For all his willingness to defy his superiors, he embodied the establishment and the world order of the British Empire. Although raised in working class Liverpool and more than able to handle themselves in a scrap, the Beatles presented themselves as quick-witted jokers rather than fighters, they were in touch with their emotions and communicated them directly (all those songs about love). They also challenged the status quo, becoming possibly the first major act to play to unsegregated audiences in the Deep South of America, because they simply refused to go on if that wasn’t the case (the negotiations on this point stretched out for nearly three weeks), and then insisted on putting that requirement in all subsequent contracts. They mocked authority rather than kowtow to it, at a time when the lower classes were expected to know their place. They didn’t only change the way young men wanted to look, they were a vital part in changing how they thought and behaved too. As playwright Alan Bleasdale put it, ‘Because of the Beatles we were going to be different from our dads.’

My favourite comment about Peter Jackson’s fascinating Get Back documentary – and sadly, I can’t remember who said it – was that when you see the Beatles interacting in the studio, they seem very modern. We don’t necessarily notice it at first, because watching them some 50 or so years later it feels so normal. But when Jackson cuts to vox pops with passers-by during the famous rooftop performance, the contrast is striking: everyone else seems extremely dated. The Beatles dragged post-war Britain into the modern world. They changed us.

And quite apart from their cultural impact, the music was groundbreaking, exhilarating and without equal. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut says that a plausible mission for artists is to make people appreciate being alive, at least a little bit. When people ask if he can name any artists who pulled that off, he replied, ‘The Beatles did.’ To be honest, I can’t think of a better example.

Overrated? If anything, they’re the most underrated band in the world.