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I am among the many parents who have had to explain the Beatles this past week, or "Jim, George, Paul and Ringo" as my five-year-old son identified the cover of one of the many publications their famous faces currently adorn.

Even before this latest frenzy of interest around the remastered albums and Rock Band computer game, I suspect most children had a passing familiarity with some of their songs.

My son sings Yellow Submarine in the playground. Yet his grasp of details remains sketchy.

Watching a BBC documentary, he was surprised to learn that the Beatles lived in "the black-and-white world" and only discovered colour at about the same time they invented moustaches.

In the fast moving and youthful world of pop, the continued pre-eminence of the Beatles is quite extraordinary. Partly this is because the brand has been astutely managed over the decades, with carefully staggered releases of out-takes, live recordings and compilations.

Long after the core of the music business has migrated to the internet, you still can't legally download the Beatles.

That should now change as new songs are made available for the Rock Band game, bringing the Beatles to iTunes surely being the long-term goal of the union of the two Apple companies. (The Beatles' record label and the computer company were locked in trademark litigation for decades.)

Indeed, The Beatles: Rock Band is the real bridge to the future, specifically designed to keep this most lucrative of shows on the road. Why should children care about a group their grandparents danced to 40 years ago?

There is an abiding suspicion that the continued obsession with the Beatles is driven by media nostalgia. Has the band's primacy become a self-perpetuating myth?

The Beatles were the first – and last – truly universal stars of modern global pop culture. They were inescapable.

Certainly there were big stars before but, in the separation of high and low culture, the divide between youth and adult interests and the relative infancy of global mass media, it was quite possible to disregard anything that didn't correspond with your own interests.

The Beatles were so tied into the technological, social and cultural advances of the '60s that they became the prism through which people viewed that most revolutionary of decades. After the Beatles, pop music began to fragment again, so consumers could choose according to taste (punk and disco co-existed, serving different audiences).

Now the expanding margins of the internet service the primacy of individual taste. The Beatles' universal appeal was not just about being the right band in the right place at the right time; it was a direct response to the most extraordinary musical journey in pop history.

In just seven years, the Beatles went from a rock-and-roll dance band to psychedelic visionaries to mature singer-songwriters, from musical adolescents to adult artists. And it is a journey listeners can still take with them.

Indeed, this is not just a musical game, it is a mystical quest. Kids might start in the playground with Yellow Submarine but they can suffer adolescent existential crises singing Help!, fall in love to Here, There and Everywhere, rage against society on Revolution and contemplate the utter strangeness of the universe to the tune of I Am the Walrus.

There is a whole education in the Beatles. Their longevity may suit our nostalgia but it works only because the songs have become the folk music of our times, so brilliant and wide-ranging that they exert a powerful grip on the imagination, whatever your age.


Neil McCormick is a music critic for The Daily Telegraph, London.