"All You Need Is Love" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as a non-album single in July 1967, with "Baby, You're a Rich Man" as its B-side.

With an orchestral arrangement by George Martin, the song begins with a portion of the French national anthem "La Marseillaise" and ends with musical quotations from works such as Glenn Miller's "In the Mood", "Greensleeves", Bach's Invention No.

Adding to the broadcast's festive atmosphere, the studio was adorned with signs and streamers and filled with guests dressed in psychedelic attire, including members of the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Small Faces.

[5] "All You Need Is Love", and its B-side, "Baby, You're a Rich Man", were later included on the US Magical Mystery Tour album and served as the two morals for the Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine.

While the song remains synonymous with the 1967 Summer of Love ethos and provided the foundation for Lennon's legacy as a humanitarian, numerous critics found the message naïve in retrospect, particularly during the 1980s.

[8] The band undertook the assignment at a time when they were considering making a television special, Magical Mystery Tour,[9] and working on songs for the animated film Yellow Submarine, for which they were contractually obliged to United Artists to supply four new recordings.

[11][nb 1] In a statement to Melody Maker magazine, Brian Epstein, the band's manager, said of "All You Need Is Love": "It was an inspired song and they really wanted to give the world a message.

[17] The song's advocacy of the all-importance of love followed Lennon's introduction of the idea in his lyrics to "The Word" in 1965[18][19] and George Harrison's declaration in "Within You Without You", from the band's recently released Sgt.

[26] Musicologist Russell Reising writes that, although the song represents the peak of the Beatles' overtly psychedelic phase, the change in metre during the verses is the sole example of the experimental aspect that typifies the band's work in that genre.

The prominent cello line draws attention to this departure from pop-single normality, although it was not the first time that the Beatles had experimented with varied metre within a single song: "Love You To" and "She Said She Said" were earlier examples.

[2] On the Beatles' recording, the song starts with the first few bars of the French national anthem, "La Marseillaise", and contains elements from other musical works, such as Glenn Miller's 1939 hit "In the Mood".

[38][nb 2] Like musicologist Alan Pollack, Kenneth Womack views the "She Loves You" refrain as serving a similar purpose to the wax models of the Beatles depicted on the cover of Sgt.

[38] The initial line-up was Lennon on harpsichord, McCartney on double bass with a bow, Harrison on violin – three instruments that were unfamiliar to the musicians[43] – while Starr played drums.

[44] The engineers at Olympic thought the Beatles displayed a surprising lack of care during this process,[4] a sign, according to author Ian MacDonald, of the group's new preference for randomness in contrast to the high production standards of Sgt.

[47] As part of this pre-broadcast promotion, the Beatles posed in a yard beside the studio building, wearing boards that together spelt out "All You Need Is Love"[48] and approximations of the song title in three other languages.

The Beatles and their entourage were dressed in psychedelic clothes and scarves; in his report on the performance, Barry Miles likened the setting to a medieval gathering, broken only by the presence of modern studio equipment such as large headphones and microphones.

[65] It opened with the band playing "All You Need Is Love" for about a minute, before Martin, speaking from the studio control room, suggested that the orchestra should take their places for the recording as the tape was rewound.

[39][66] In the opinion of music critic Richie Unterberger, the performance of "All You Need Is Love" is "the best footage of the Beatles in the psychedelic period" and "captures Flower Power at its zenith, with enough irreverence to avoid pomposity, what with the sandwich boards of lyrics, the florid clothing and decor, and celebrity guests".

[39][66] On 26 June, in EMI's Studio 2, Lennon's vocal was treated with ADT,[68] and Starr overdubbed a drum roll at the start of the track, replacing a tambourine part.

[74] In his contemporary review for Melody Maker, Nick Jones said the Beatles represented the "progressive avant-garde" in their approach to singles releases, and that "All You Need Is Love" was "another milestone in their very phenomenal career".

He described the song as a "cool, calculated contagious Beatles singsong" that was more immediate than "Strawberry Fields Forever", and concluded: "The message is 'love' and I hope everyone in the whole wide world manages to get it.

[7][91] Writing in 2001, Peter Doggett said that the Beatles' performance on Our World "remains one of the strongest visual impressions of the summer of love";[60] Womack describes it as "flower power's finest moment".

In his commentary for the magazine, producer and musician Dave Stewart admired the track's "jumbled-up mix of music – marching band and rock'n'roll" and recalled the Beatles' Our World appearance as "a signal for those [of us] who felt we were trapped in a mental hospital in some suburban town to break out".

[68][nb 9] In a 1981 article on the musical and social developments of 1967, sociomusicologist Simon Frith described "All You Need Is Love" as a "genuinely moving song" and said that, further to the impact of Sgt.

[16] By contrast, NME critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler detected self-parody in the song, saying that the Beatles sought to debunk their elevated status during the Summer of Love.

[107][nb 10] He also writes that, in summer 1967, "links between the counterculture and the New Left remained murky", since a full dialogue regarding politics and rock music was still a year away and would only be inspired by Lennon's 1968 song "Revolution".

[112][113] In the mid-1970s, according to Carr and Tyler, it was still "impossible" to hear the start of the French national anthem without launching into "All You Need Is Love", yet even a contrite "reformed hippie" could "bellow tunelessly along with this glorious, irreverent single without any real embarrassment – a measure of its internal strength and durability".

[117]Writing in 1988, author and critic Tim Riley identified the track's "internal contradictions (positivisms expressed with negatives)" and "bloated self-confidence ('it's easy')" as qualities that rendered it as "the naive answer to 'A Day in the Life'".

[118] By contrast, Mark Hertsgaard considers "All You Need Is Love" to be among the Beatles' finest songs and one of the few highlights among their recordings from the Magical Mystery Tour–Yellow Submarine era.

"[116][nb 11] Writing in 2017, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney of the Financial Times said that the song "appears hopelessly naïve 50 years on" yet its espousal of global connectedness had become increasingly relevant.