Somewhere on a Liverpool street, a man named Julien was asked a simple question: could he play ‘All You Need Is Love’? What followed was not a rehearsed performance or a ticketed show. It was the kind of moment that makes strangers stop walking and start listening, because the music found them before they had a chance to decide whether to care.
The request came casually, almost like a dare. Someone leaned in and asked if Julien could play the Beatles track, and after a beat of hesitation, he could. The first notes landed quietly, and then the song opened up the way that particular song always does, with that insistent, generous claim: there is nothing you can do that cannot be done, nothing you can sing that cannot be sung.
When the street became the stage
What began as one musician responding to one request grew into something the pavement had not been expecting. The chorus arrived and voices around Julien started finding it, not all at once, but in the way that crowds join things when they sense the moment is real rather than staged. ‘All you need is love’ is a line that does not ask much of a stranger. Anyone can sing it. That accessibility is the trap the song sets, and Liverpool, of all cities, was always going to fall into it.
The city where the Beatles grew up has a complicated relationship with that legacy, one that is simultaneously exhausted by the tourism and quietly proud of what those four people made. A flashmob playing their most optimistic song in the open air is either the most obvious thing imaginable or, depending on where you are standing when it starts, genuinely moving. On this afternoon, it appeared to be the latter.
The song moved through its verses with that particular Beatles logic, stacking small impossibilities into a larger reassurance: there is nowhere you can be that is not where you are meant to be. By the time that line arrived, the performance had long since stopped being about any single musician.
The moment the chorus stopped needing a leader
Julien put it plainly at the start, in that single moment of hesitation before the first note: ‘Oh uh like’ and then the decision to simply play. That pause, barely a second long, is where the whole thing was won or lost.
The song ended where it always ends, cycling back through ‘love is all you need’ until the repetition stops feeling like a lyric and starts feeling like a fact the crowd is agreeing to together.
The instrument, mid-song
Julien’s instrument, mid-performance, surrounded by a street that had not planned to become an audience.
The man who was asked a casual question answered it, and for a few minutes on a Liverpool afternoon, the answer was enough.
