What would the world have been like without the Beatles?

Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis’s film, Yesterday, imagines what might have happened if the Fab Four had never existed. Guardian writers and Beatles experts offer their own alternative histories

Towards the end of Jon Savage’s masterful book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, there’s a telling line from an interview with the Who’s Pete Townshend, surveying the disparate pop scene in December of that year. “It needs the Beatles,” he said, “to sort things out.”