The Beatles made their first entry into the pop chart in January 1963, reaching the lofty heights of No.16 with Love Me Do.

On my fifth birthday the number one single in the “Hit Parade” The Next Time, an awful ballad by Cliff Richard. So I’m not going to post that.

In fact I can find only a couple of tunes I know and like in the Top Twenty that week – Telstar by The Tornados and Let’s Dance by Chris Montez, which I remember from its re-release a decade later.

The charts really were filled with Tin Pan Alley rubbish.

Eventually I scroll down and find a brand new group whose single, released the previous October, had finally crept into the Top Twenty for the first time, rising from No.24 to a lofty No.17.

That would become its highest chart position – a modest start for a new band, but one with which the fresh-faced youngsters were probably satisfied.

It seems entirely apt for a simple song that sounds as if it must have taken about five minutes to write – and probably did when a 16-year-old Liverpool lad jotted down the words in one of his school exercise books while playing truant one day in the late 1950s.

I doubt he needed a rhyming dictionary to come up with that “do/you/true” scheme. Or that the band took long to add those three chords to the rudimentary lyric.

I was probably playing with toy soldiers at the time so it passed me by, but it gave the British public and that new generation of “teenagers” their first glimpse of the group who would go on to be embraced with a great deal more enthusiasm.

Within three months The Beatles were at No.2 with Please Please Me.