Credit: Far Out / NBC
Sat 8 August 2026 21:30, UK
For over 50 years, America’s Saturday Night Live has not only stood as TV’s leading comedy show but also as a prime spot for some of music’s most memorable performances.
While the show has soldiered through dry spells and fluctuating ratings, SNL has endured as a pop cultural institution, launching the careers of everybody from Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, and Tina Fey, and even stretching on to British screens with this year’s Saturday Night Live UK. Despite competition over the years, from Second City Television to In Living Color, nobody has yet managed to knock SNL’s comedy command on the small screen.
Naturally, such a stature has resulted in the show’s music slots as a key platform for many artists eager to reach new audiences. SNL has also proved to win some of the big names that have taken the Studio 8H stage at Manhattan’s Comcast Building their most iconic shows. From punk band Fear’s live on-air mosh pit, Sinéad O’Connor’s tearing up of Pope John Paul II’s photograph in protest of the Catholic Church’s abuses, and David Bowie injecting the New York avant-garde to the mainstream with his plastic tuxedo’d rendition of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’.
SNL even nearly brought Paul McCartney and John Lennon to the studio for an impromptu reunion. Jokingly, show producer Lorne Michaels offered $3,000 if all four Beatles reunited on the show, prompting both McCartney and Lennon, who were watching the tongue-in-cheek proposition from Lennon’s apartment in town, to briefly consider arriving on a whim to claim the cash and play an impromptu jam.
Lennon remained the only Beatle to never appear on SNL, the remaining three all having guested or hosted during its lengthy run, as well as another key character from Fab Four lore.
So, what was the first-ever song performed on SNL?
For the first-ever SNL on October 11th, 1975, stand-up comic and satirist George Carlin introduced America to the original ‘Not Ready for Prime Time Players’ cast, featuring the debut line-up of Dan Akroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Laraine Newman.
The very first ‘cold opening’ sketch featured Michael O’Donoghue playing a teacher teaching Belushi’s immigrant student English, when the tutor suddenly dies of a heart attack, and the student dutifully copies the professor’s example by keeling over too. Kick-starting the SNL tradition, a double denimed Chase announced the immortal “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!”
Further reading: From The Vault
SNL managed to nab two artists for the debut episode’s music segments. Performing in between Carlin’s monologue and the ‘shark bite’ skit, folk pop singer Janis Ian sang her ‘At Seventeen’ hit, then later rounded off the episode before the credits with her wistful ‘In the Winter’, already demonstrating that a dramatic number could work within a comedy show.
Taking the stage first, however, was old Beatles associate and master keyboardist Billy Preston, who followed Akroyd’s ‘new dad’ sketch with a performance of ‘Nothing From Nothing’ with Alan Taylor on drums, later to treat the audience to ‘Fancy Lady’ off his recently released It’s My Pleasure once Carlin’s second bit on God and religion had finished.
