"Love Me Do is Paul’s song. He wrote it when he was a teenager. Let me think. I might have helped on the middle eight, but I couldn’t swear to it. I do know he had the song around, in Hamburg, even, way, way before we were songwriters."

John Lennon, 1980, All We Are Saying, David Sheff

"Love Me Do was completely co-written. It might have been my original idea but some of them really were 50-50s, and I think that one was. It was just Lennon and McCartney sitting down without either of us having a particularly original idea.

We loved doing it, it was a very interesting thing to try and learn to do, to become songwriters. I think why we eventually got so strong was we wrote so much through our formative period. Love Me Do was our first hit, which ironically is one of the two songs that we control, because when we first signed to EMI they had a publishing company called Ardmore and Beechwood which took the two songs, Love Me Do and PS I Love You, and in doing a deal somewhere along the way we were able to get them back."

Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

"For me that was more important than anything else. That first piece of plastic. You can’t believe how great that was. It was so wonderful. We were on a record!"

Ringo, 1976

"In Hamburg we clicked. At the Cavern we clicked. But if you want to know when we ‘knew’ we’d arrived, it was getting in the charts with Love Me Do. That was the one. It gave us somewhere to go."

Paul McCartney

"There were enough fans of The Beatles around because we were playing all over the Wirral, Cheshire, Manchester and Liverpool. We were quite popular, so the sales were real.

First hearing Love Me Do on the radio sent me shivery all over. It was the best buzz of all time. We knew it was going to be on Radio Luxembourg at something like 7.30 on Thursday night. I was in my house in Speke and we all listened in. That was great, but after having got to 17, I don’t recall what happened to it. It probably went away and died, but what it meant was that the next time we went to EMI, they were more friendly: ‘Oh, hello lads. Come in.’"

George Harrison, Anthology

Med disse citater fra de fire Beatlesmedlemmer markerer bloggen 50-året for Beatles’ indspilning af "Love me do" – "the first faint chime of a revolutionary bell" (Ian MacDonald)