BEATLES MAGAZINE: STING IS GRATEFUL FOR THE INFLUENCE OF THE BEATLES

Tuesday, 6 January 2026

STING IS GRATEFUL FOR THE INFLUENCE OF THE BEATLES

Sting credits The Beatles with empowering an entire generation of musicians to find their own voices, noting that they effectively "opened the floodgates" for aspiring songwriters.

This sentiment is shared by his longtime touring guitarist, Dominic Miller, who recently published The Beatles arranged by Dominic Miller: Guitar Solo Songbook, a collection featuring 14 classical guitar arrangements of the band's iconic tracks.

Miller explains that he and the 74-year-old former Police frontman frequently discuss the Fab Four’s enduring legacy, with Sting maintaining that the songwriting mastery of McCartney, Lennon, Harrison, and Starr laid the essential groundwork for all subsequent British artists.

In an interview Miller said: "As Sting has often said, actually – and we talk about this sometimes – is that the Beatles, by doing those songs and coming up with those compositions, they kind of gave a license for everyone else to have a go. These guys from Liverpool, if they can do it, everyone should try, and so it opened the floodgates for a lot of songwriters to have an attempt at writing songs, which had never really happened before in England, like pop songs – verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge."

He said: "So there's a neighbour of ours about three or four doors down who's probably a piano teacher, and they're teaching this kid to play Bach, but it's the most beautiful thing I could ever hear. So I look forward to that moment when they have their lesson, and I hear Bach played badly with no real tempo, but that's the most beautiful thing that you can hear.And I think it's the same for The Beatles. If someone were to play Michelle or Yesterday badly, the magic would still come through. So that was the biggest discovery for me – how indestructible this harmony is."

“Like Bach, I think the Beatles are one of the only composers that you can play badly, and it still sounds good.”

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