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If challenged to hum, whistle or sing 12 Beatles songs in the space of five minutes I could offer Hey Jude, Fool on the Hill, Obladi Oblada, Eleanor Rigby, Yesterday, Something in the Way she Moves, She Loves You, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Lovely Rita Meter-Maid, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Lady Madonna. And for a baker's dozen I'll chuck in Lennon's Imagine. That actually took two minutes and I could give you another dozen within the remaining three minutes. These and a great many of the others – Wikipedia lists 258 of them – are so familiar that at any time you can hear and recognise them on ring-tones, through a random scan of your radio channels, on the annoying musak of supermarkets or in music shops from Kyoto to Quito and from Hobart to Harlem.

Now I throw down the gauntlet. I'll grant you that the Rolling Stones have longevity; you could almost describe them as Eolithic. But I challenge you Rolling Stones fans to hum, whistle or sing twelve of their lyrics in the space of five minutes.

As a starter I'll offer you I Can't Get No Satisfaction, and I'll throw in Jumping Jack Flash – though I couldn't recognise its tune or get beyond the three words of its title. Wikipedia lists 177 of their songs - that's a sizeable collection. But whenever do you hear them played, at random and in public – except when the elderly gentlemen themselves perform at gigs?

So, you Lithophiles, I throw down the gauntlet. Prove me wrong. The point I'm trying to make is that the Beatles started with what any musicologist might have foreseen as the most unpromising materials, in middle- to lower-class Liverpool and with little-to-none musical "education".

Yet in all too few years the Fab Four produced the most amazing and in my view an almost unmatched flow of creative and popular music-making since Mozart (allowing for a few nods to Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf on the way). It was in fact exactly 40 years ago that the Beatles last played in public, on a rooftop in Mayfair. They recorded four songs for the album Let It Be before a young police constable ordered them to “turn that noise off”.

Radio stations in the UK, and probably elsewhere around the world, have been marking the melancholy anniversary with eine kleine Beatlemusik, and Radio 2 aired a one-hour documentary on that event (which ended with John Lennon quipping "I Hope We Passed the Audition"). The Sunday Times quoted the producer of the documentary, Des Shaw, as saying: “It’s been calculated by copyright and royalty analysts that not a minute goes by without a Beatles record being played on some radio station somewhere” [and] “I’ve seen and heard nothing that leads me to doubt that.”

The Sunday Times also points out that it was radio that helped turn four unknown lads from Merseyside into stars, starting with their debut on a Manchester-based BBC show called Teenagers’ Turn in March 1962. This was long before they had recorded their first single or appeared on the small screen. Television may have created the look of pop in the early 1960s, but it was radio that was the vehicle for its sound, and it was the sound that enthralled a generation.

Today that sound, and the lyrics, still enthrall people of all ages — youngsters with admirably wide-ranging tastes, oldies who were there at the time and those in the middle, such as listeners to Absolute Radio (which used to be Virgin Radio until last September) who have an average age of 38. Well, I've thrown down a challenge. Now I'll brace myself for the Stones.

Editor's Comment: John Bland may be an Oldie, but my son, who is eight, ranks Yellow Submarine and Love Me Do as among his top hums.  He has not quite got into the Stones. My daughter - 15 - is more into Hey Jude while listening to anything from Amy Winehouse to The Supremes.