Inside Abbey Road’s Studio One, the cameras captured a scene that was part recording session, part salon. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sat cross-legged on the floor, while Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithfull and a dozen other musicians and friends crowded around the four Beatles. A thirteen-piece orchestra, conducted by George Martin, filled the back of the room. At 9:36 p.m. London time, as the BBC’s ‘Our World’ programme fed the image live to twenty-four countries, John Lennon began to sing a simple refrain commissioned for the occasion: “Love, love, love.” The first truly global satellite broadcast had found its soundtrack.

The performance was the centrepiece of a two-and-a-half-hour transmission that mobilised some ten thousand technicians, producers and translators, and forbade any pre-recorded material or appearances by heads of state. Each participating nation supplied its own announcers and cultural segments — Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso appeared from their home countries — but the British contribution, lasting barely four minutes, became the evening’s most talked-about moment. The BBC had asked the group to write a song with a message “easy to understand” in any language. Lennon delivered a chorus that would travel from a hippie slogan to a universal manifesto, and the single, backed with ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’, was in shops by early July.

For decades, the date lingered in fan lore until 2009, when Faith Cohen, a long-time American admirer, established the Global Beatles Day as a community-driven online initiative. What began as a modest call to celebrate the band’s music and message grew organically into a decentralised network of tribute concerts, sing-alongs, film screenings and listening parties. This year, Apple Corps Ltd — the company founded by the Beatles to manage their affairs — formally recognised the commemoration, and Paul McCartney marked it with a social-media post: “Have a great time on what is now World Beatles Day (good band!) – Paul.”

The day’s geography now stretches far beyond Liverpool. In Mexico, free open-air screenings of ‘Help!’ were scheduled at the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City and at university cinemas in Guadalajara and Zapopan, while listening parties took over record shops in the capital’s Roma neighbourhood and in Monterrey. Similar events unfolded in Tokyo, New York and Buenos Aires, where fans gathered to sing the catalogue in public parks. Apple Corps released a newly colourised version of the 1967 performance on YouTube, making the historic footage freely available for the first time, and invited fans worldwide to register their own local gatherings on the band’s official site.

Tom Greene, Apple Corps’ chief executive, described the day as speaking to “something vital: community, connection and the power to bring people together.” The celebration asks for nothing more than to stop, listen and share a little joy. More than half a century after that June evening in Abbey Road, the four-minute performance designed to be understood everywhere has become a day when, for a moment, the world sings along again.