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The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. They became the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed act in the history of popular music.[1] The group's best-known lineup consisted of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Rooted in skiffle and 1950s rock and roll, the Beatles later utilized several genres, ranging from pop ballads to psychedelic rock, often incorporating classical and other elements in innovative ways. In the early 1960s, their enormous popularity first emerged as "Beatlemania", but as their songwriting grew in sophistication, they came to be perceived by many fans and cultural observers as an embodiment of the ideals shared by the era's sociocultural revolutions.
The band built their reputation playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg over a three-year period from 1960. Manager Brian Epstein moulded them into a professional act and producer George Martin enhanced their musical potential. They gained popularity in the United Kingdom after their first modest hit, "Love Me Do", in late 1962. They acquired the nickname the "Fab Four" as Beatlemania grew in Britain over the following year, and by early 1964 they had become international stars, leading the "British Invasion" of the United States pop market. From 1965 on, the Beatles produced what many critics consider their finest material, including the innovative and widely influential albums Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles (1968), and Abbey Road (1969). After their break-up in 1970, they each enjoyed successful musical careers. Lennon died in 1980 after having been shot by a deranged former fan, and Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001. McCartney and Starr remain musically active.
They have had more number-one albums on the British charts and sold more singles in the UK than any other act. According to the RIAA, as of 2012 the Beatles have sold 177 million units in the US, more than any other artist. In 2008, the group topped Billboard magazine's list of the all-time most successful "Hot 100" artists. As of 2012, they hold the record for most number-one hits on the Hot 100 chart with 20. They have received 7 Grammy Awards from the American National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score and 15 Ivor Novello Awards from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. Collectively included in Time magazine's compilation of the 20th century's 100 most influential people, the Beatles are the best-selling band in history, with EMI Records estimating sales of over one billion units.
History1957–62: formation, Hamburg, and UK popularityHistory of The Beatles
The Quarrymen
In Hamburg
At The Cavern Club
Decca audition
Beatlemania in the United Kingdom
North American releases
In the United States
1966
More popular than Jesus
Studio years
In India
Break-up
Reunions
Line-ups
Religious beliefs
Timeline
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In March 1957, John Lennon, then aged sixteen, formed a skiffle group with several friends from Quarry Bank school. They briefly called themselves the Blackjacks, before changing their name to the Quarrymen after discovering that a respected local group was already using the name.[2] Fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney joined as a rhythm guitarist shortly after he and Lennon met that July.[3] In February 1958, McCartney invited his friend George Harrison to watch the band. The fourteen-year-old auditioned for Lennon, impressing him with his playing, but Lennon initially thought Harrison was too young to join. After a month of Harrison's persistence, they enlisted him as their lead guitarist.[4][5] By January 1959, Lennon's Quarry Bank friends had left the group, and he began studies at the Liverpool College of Art.[6] The three guitarists, billing themselves at least three times as Johnny and the Moondogs,[7] were playing rock and roll whenever they could find a drummer.[8] Lennon's art school friend Stu Sutcliffe, who had recently sold one of his paintings and purchased a bass guitar, joined in January 1960, and it was he who suggested changing the band's name to Beatals as a tribute to Buddy Holly and the Crickets.[9] They used the name through May, when they became the Silver Beetles, before undertaking a brief tour of Scotland as the backing group for pop singer and fellow Liverpudlian Johnny Gentle. By early July, they changed their name to the Silver Beatles and by the middle of August to the Beatles.[10]
Their lack of a full-time drummer posed a problem when the group's unofficial manager, Allan Williams, arranged a resident band booking for them in Hamburg, Germany, so in mid-August they auditioned and hired Pete Best. The band, now a five-piece, left four days later, contracted to club owner Bruno Koschmider for what would be a 3?-month residency.[11] Beatles' historian Mark Lewisohn wrote, "They pulled into Hamburg at dusk on 17 August, the time when the red-light area comes to life ... flashing neon lights screamed out the various entertainment on offer, while scantily clad women sat unabashed in shop windows waiting for business opportunities".[12]
Koschmider had converted a couple of strip clubs in the district into music venues, and he initially placed the group at the Indra Club. After closing the Indra due to noise complaints, he moved them to the Kaiserkeller in October.[13] When he learned they had been performing at the rival Top Ten Club in breach of their contract, he gave the band one month's termination notice,[14] and reported the underage Harrison, who had obtained permission to stay in Hamburg by lying to the German authorities about his age.[15] The authorities arranged for Harrison's deportation in late November.[16] One week later, Koschmider had McCartney and Best arrested for arson after they set fire to a tapestry on the wall in their room; the authorities deported them.[17] Lennon returned to Liverpool in early December, while Sutcliffe remained in Hamburg through late February with his German fiancee Astrid Kirchherr,[18] who took the first semi-professional photos of the Beatles.[19]
During the next two years, the Beatles were resident for periods in Hamburg, where they used Preludin both recreationally and to maintain their energy through all-night performances.[20] In 1961, during their second Hamburg engagement, Kirchherr cut Sutcliffe's hair in the "exi" (existentialist) style, later adopted by the other Beatles.[21][22] When Sutcliffe decided to leave the band early that year and resume his art studies in Germany, McCartney took up the bass.[23] Producer Bert Kaempfert contracted what was now a four-piece group through June 1962, and he used them as Tony Sheridan's backing band on a series of recordings.[24][nb 1]
After completing their second Hamburg residency, the band enjoyed increasing popularity in Liverpool, particularly in Merseyside, with the growing Merseybeat movement. However, they were also growing tired of the monotony of numerous appearances at the same clubs night after night.[26] In November, during one of the group's frequent appearances at the Cavern Club, they encountered Brian Epstein, a local record store owner and music columnist.[27] He later recalled, "I immediately liked what I heard. They were fresh, and they were honest, and they had what I thought was a sort of presence ... [a] star quality."[28] Epstein courted the band over the next couple of months, and they appointed him manager in January 1962.[29] After an early February audition, Decca Records rejected the band with the comment "Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein."[30][nb 2] Tragedy greeted them upon their return to Germany in April, when a distraught Kirchherr met them at the airport with news of Sutcliffe's death the previous day from what would later be determined a brain haemorrhage.[32] The following month, George Martin signed the Beatles to EMI's Parlophone label.[32]
Abbey Road Studios main entranceThe band's first recording session under Martin's direction took place at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London on 6 June 1962.[33] Martin immediately complained to Epstein about Best's poor drumming and suggested they use a session drummer in his stead.[34] Already contemplating Best's dismissal,[35] the Beatles replaced him in mid-August with Ringo Starr, who left Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to join them.[33] A 4 September session at EMI yielded a recording of "Love Me Do" featuring Starr on drums, but a dissatisfied Martin hired drummer Andy White for the band's third session a week later, which produced recordings of "Love Me Do", "Please Please Me" and "P.S. I Love You".[33] Martin initially selected the Starr version of "Love Me Do" for the band's first single, though subsequent re-pressings featured the White version, with Starr on tambourine.[33] Released in early October, "Love Me Do" peaked at number seventeen on the Record Retailer chart.[36] Their television debut came later that month with a live performance on the regional news programme People and Places.[37] A studio session in late November yielded another recording of "Please Please Me",[38] of which Martin accurately predicted, "You've just made your first No.1."[39]
In December 1962, the Beatles concluded their fifth and final Hamburg residency.[40] By 1963, they had agreed that all four band members would contribute vocals to their albums—including Starr, despite his restricted vocal range, to validate his standing in the group.[41] Lennon and McCartney had established a songwriting partnership, and as the band's success grew, their dominant collaboration limited Harrison's opportunities as a lead vocalist.[42] Epstein, in an effort to maximize the Beatles' commercial potential, encouraged them to adopt a professional approach to performing.[43] Lennon recalled him saying, "Look, if you really want to get in these bigger places, you're going to have to change—stop eating on stage, stop swearing, stop smoking".[30] Lennon said, "We used to dress how we liked, on and off stage. He'd tell us that jeans were not particularly smart and could we possibly manage to wear proper trousers, but he didn't want us suddenly looking square. He'd let us have our own sense of individuality".[30]
1963–66: Beatlemania and touring yearsPlease Please Me and With the BeatlesIn February 1963, the Beatles recorded ten songs during a single marathon studio session for their debut LP, Please Please Me. The album was supplemented by the four tracks already released on their first two singles.[44][nb 3] After the moderate success of "Love Me Do", "Please Please Me" met with a more emphatic reception. Released in January 1963, two months ahead of the album of the same name, the song reached number one on every chart in London except Record Retailer, where it stalled at number two.[45] Recalling how the Beatles "rushed to deliver a debut album, bashing out Please Please Me in a day", Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine comments, "Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh, precisely because of its intense origins."[46] Lennon said little thought went into composition at the time; he and McCartney were "just writing songs a la Everly Brothers, a la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought of them than that—to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant."[47]
Their logo was based on an impromptu sketch by instrument retailer and designer Ivor Arbiter.[48]Released in March 1963, the album initiated a run during which eleven of their twelve studio albums released in the United Kingdom through 1970 reached number one.[49] The band's third single, "From Me to You", came out in April and was also a chart-topping hit, starting an almost unbroken string of seventeen British number one singles for the Beatles, including all but one of the eighteen they released over the next six years.[50] Released in August, the band's fourth single, "She Loves You", achieved the fastest sales of any record in the UK up to that time, selling three-quarters of a million copies in under four weeks.[51] It became their first single to sell a million copies, and remained the biggest-selling record in the UK until 1978, when "Mull of Kintyre", by McCartney's post-Beatles band Wings, surpassed it in sales.[52] Their commercial success brought increased media exposure, to which the Beatles responded with an irreverent and comical attitude that defied the expectations of pop musicians at the time, inspiring even more interest.[53][nb 4] As their popularity spread, a frenzied adulation of the group took hold. Greeted with riotous enthusiasm by screaming fans, the press dubbed the phenomenon "Beatlemania".[55][56]
McCartney, Harrison, Swedish pop singer Lill-Babs and Lennon on the set of the Swedish television show Drop-In, 30 October 1963[57]In late October, the Beatles began a five-day tour of Sweden, their first time abroad since the final Hamburg engagement of December 1962.[58] Upon their return to the UK on the 31 December, "several hundred screaming fans" greeted them in heavy rain at Heathrow Airport wrote Lewisohn. Around fifty to a hundred journalists and photographers as well as representatives from the BBC also joined the airport reception, the first of more than one hundred such events.[59] The next day, they began their fourth tour of Britain within nine months, this one scheduled for six weeks.[60] In mid-November, as Beatlemania intensified, police resorted to using high-pressure water hoses to control the crowd before a concert in Plymouth.[61]
Please Please Me maintained the top position on the Record Retailer chart for thirty weeks, only to be displaced by their follow-up, With the Beatles, which EMI delayed the release of until sales of Please Please Me had subsided.[62][nb 5] Recorded between July and October, With the Beatles made better use of studio production techniques than its predecessor.[64] It held the top spot for twenty-one weeks with a chart life of 40 weeks.[65] Erlewine described the LP as "a sequel of the highest order—one that betters the original".[66][nb 6] The album caught the attention of music critic William Mann of The Times, who suggested that Lennon and McCartney were "the outstanding English composers of 1963".[64] The newspaper published a series of articles in which Mann offered detailed analyses of the music, lending it respectability.[68] With the Beatles became the second album in UK chart history to sell a million copies, a figure previously reached only by the 1958 South Pacific soundtrack.[69] In writing the sleeve notes for the album, the band's press officer, Tony Barrow used the superlative the "fabulous foursome", which the media widely adopted as the "Fab Four".[70]
"British Invasion" "I Want to Hold Your Hand"
Menu0:00.Sample of the single "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (1963) which secured the band's international success when it achieved enormous US popularity a few weeks before their debut in the country
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EMI's American subsidiary, Capitol Records