It was the pivotal period in the 1960s when British bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones revolutionised the music scene.
In this episode, we look into the British Invasion, the time when British music acts dominated the American musical landscape.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something called “The British Invasion”.
[00:00:27] It was the period in the 1960s when British bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones arrived in America, changing the country’s musical scene, and leaving a legacy that would last, well, to this very day.
[00:00:42] It’s a fascinating story, the story of how British rock bands came to pack such a powerful punch, so let’s get right into it.
[00:00:53] February 9th, 1964, was in many ways a Sunday like any other.
[00:01:00] Tens of millions of Americans sat down in front of their television sets, ready for an evening of light entertainment.
[00:01:09] One of the most popular shows of the time was the Ed Sullivan Show, a family-friendly programme which ran from 1948 to 1971.
[00:01:21] That evening's show, however, would be unlike any other.
[00:01:27] For this show, the producers had booked four young men from Liverpool. Their names were Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They were, of course, The Beatles.
[00:01:43] As the young men took the stage, with their dark hair and dark suits, the crowd erupted into shrieks and wild applause.
[00:01:54] Only 728 tickets for the show had been made publicly available, and there had been more than 50,000 requests. A record breaking 73 million people, that's 34% of the entire US population, watched it on live TV. And according to one anecdote, during the time that The Beatles were live on The Ed Sullivan Show, not a single crime would be reported in New York City.
[00:02:26] That evening would kickstart what would come to be called “The British Invasion”, the domination of US musical culture by British groups, a domination that would go on for the best part of three decades.
[00:02:41] So, what happened, how did it get to this point, and what was the lasting legacy of this “invasion”?
[00:02:50] Well, first, some background.
[00:02:53] In terms of what was going on economically and culturally in Britain, as you may know, the post-war period was one characterised by struggle.
[00:03:04] Rationing, the government-imposed limiting of foods and other goods, only ended in 1954, almost 10 years after the end of the war. Britain was not a rich country; there was high unemployment, wage stagnation, life was not great for most people.
[00:03:24] Across the pond, in the United States, the recovery had been much quicker, and the United States had experienced an economic boom.
[00:03:33] With this came a new generation of singers and musicians, people like Elvis Presley, who you can learn all about in episode number 228 by the way.
[00:03:44] The US was the musical centre of the world, and young British people looked to America for inspiration. On a practical level, the US was also where the best instruments and recording technology were being made, so if you wanted to make great sounding music, American equipment was what you needed.
[00:04:06] Try as they might, young British musicians couldn’t really recreate the American sound. The UK didn’t have the same cultural influences as the US. There wasn’t blues or country music; Brits and Americans might speak the same language, but the underlying cultural differences were significant.
[00:04:31] So, what happened?
[00:04:33] Well, there was one American musical genre that young British musicians embraced almost as their own, giving it its own new lease of life.
[00:04:45] This was a type of music called “skiffle”. It’s a kind of folk music that originated in the United States, but was adopted by Brits in the 1950s.
[00:04:56] It only really required guitars and singing, so it was quite easy and cheap to make, which was important in a country that was still very much in recovery mode.
[00:05:08] One early skiffle band was called The Quarrymen.
[00:05:12] Now, unless you are a serious connoisseur of this period, you might not have heard of this band, but you’ll probably see where I’m going when I tell you that the founder of this band was a teenager called John Lennon, who in 1956 recruited his friends Paul McCartney and George Harrison to join the band with him.
[00:05:34] Yes, The Quarrymen was the band that turned into The Beatles.
[00:05:40] This “skiffle” genre started to get more and more popular, but it was still a British phenomenon, not really exported outside of the United Kingdom.
[00:05:51] And as you may know, The Beatles were far from an overnight success, they didn’t play together for the first time and just turn into immediate stars. That’s why you might not have heard about The Quarrymen.
[00:06:04] The band’s first iteration, The Quarrymen, was formed in 1956, the Beatles were only formed in 1960, and it wasn’t until 1963 that they had their first number one single, and they would have to wait another year, 1964, until they got to number 1 in the US charts.
[00:06:25] This episode isn’t specifically about The Beatles, so we won’t go into their story in great detail. But the point to remind you about is that they spent this going on ten-year period honing their craft and trying to get their big break playing thousands of hours in places like their hometown of Liverpool, as well as Hamburg, in Germany, before they released their big hit, Love Me Do, in 1962.
[00:06:54] Now, let’s fast forward to 1964, precisely, to February 9th of that year, when The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.
[00:07:05] It wasn’t The Beatles’ first TV appearance in the US, but it would be the most important, catapulting them to national prominence and stardom, and launching the cultural invasion of the United States by British bands.
[00:07:21] Now, why did this happen, you might be asking yourself, why were the Beatles so popular?
[00:07:28] Well, if you are a Beatles fan, you will probably answer this question by saying “well, they just made fantastic music, hit after hit, year after year, they were just that good. That’s why”.
[00:07:41] And of course, that is a perfectly valid point, but there are a few other factors that helped first The Beatles and then the British bands that followed.
[00:07:51] Firstly, this was the early 1960s, there was an increasing idea of “the teenager”, a particular period of one’s life when you were increasingly independent, perhaps rebellious, able to make your own choices, wanting to find people and bands that represented you. This isn’t specific to the British bands, but it gives you some idea about the increasing proportion of US society that was available to become hooked on British rock music.
[00:08:25] Secondly, and moving on to specific reasons about British bands and The Beatles themselves, The Beatles embodied youthful idealism, they were the perfect symbol for idealistic teenagers of the 1960s.
[00:08:39] For starters, they were young themselves.
[00:08:43] Ringo Starr, the oldest Beatle, was only 23 at the time of their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, and George Harrison wasn’t even 20.
[00:08:53] It wasn’t like American teenagers didn’t have any of these symbols already, but one of the most prominent symbols, President JFK, had been assassinated in November the year before, and the country was still reeling from the killing of its popular youthful President. The Beatles were perfectly positioned to fill this void.
[00:09:16] They sang about positive ideas, their music was inspiring and optimistic. They provided the musical equivalent of JFK’s inspirational speeches, so these four young men from Liverpool were exactly what the country needed, they were a new emblem of youthful idealism.
[00:09:36] And thirdly, American music at the time had become somewhat formulaic and tired. Elvis Presley had been going for 10 years, and the public were ready for something new and different.
[00:09:51] And to bring it back to 1964, on the eve of the Ed Sullivan Show, so-called Beatlemania had been going on in the UK since the previous year, since 1963.
[00:10:05] The band had been playing to sold-out venues and adoring crowds for much of the previous year, so it was only a matter of time before this infectious Beatlemania virus reached the shores of America.
[00:10:20] And when it did, in 1964, the American musical landscape was never the same again.
[00:10:27] In April of that year, The Beatles held all top five positions of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, something that no band had done before or has done since.
[00:10:40] It’s hard to overestimate quite how big they were, how much they dominated American music and culture in the 1960s.
[00:10:48] But of course, it wasn’t only The Beatles.
[00:10:52] They were followed by bands like The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Animals, and the Who, and solo artists like Tom Jones and Dusty Springfield.
[00:11:02] Not only were Americans now listening to a huge amount of British music, but American youth were emulating their favourite British singers. They dressed like them, they wore their hair like them and suddenly Britain, London, everything British, was cool.
[00:11:22] Britain was out of its post-war funk, or at least, to many American teenagers, British rock bands were the epitome of cool.
[00:11:33] It was dubbed “The British Invasion”. One day, there were practically no British bands that were popular in the US. But by the mid 1960s, the American charts were filled by British rock bands.
[00:11:47] What’s more, this “invasion”, and its subsequent cultural impact, kicked off a boom in new musical groups in the US. American singers took inspiration from this British style of music, which was of course in part influenced by American music.
[00:12:06] And the result of this, for some American groups and entire genres, was a complete collapse in popularity, people just didn’t want to listen to them anymore. In fact, some commentators have gone so far as to say that this British “invasion” destroyed American music.
[00:12:27] And the invasion continued, with a second wave in the late 1960s and early 1970s which included bands like Cream, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin.
[00:12:39] Sure, there were plenty of amazing homegrown bands, American groups, from the Jimi Hendrix Experience to Jefferson Airplane to Simon & Garfunkel.
[00:12:50] But ask 100 people, British or American, to name their favourite bands from the 1960s or 1970s, and I’d be very surprised if you didn’t find out that a high proportion of these bands were British, despite the country being less than a third of the size of the US in the 1960s.
[00:13:11] This domination, this success, this “British Invasion”, continued to a certain degree in the 1980s, with bands like Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran, but, as you will know, subsequent British bands have failed to emulate the success of their predecessors.
[00:13:30] If you think of big, cult British bands from the 1990s such as Oasis and Blur, whose rivalry you can learn about in episode number 124 by the way, they never experienced any real success in the US, certainly nothing remotely comparable to the British bands of the 1960s and 1970s.
[00:13:53] In more recent years, bands like One Direction and Ed Sheeran have achieved success stateside, but with music that is kind of indistinguishable from manufactured American pop music; their success is not necessarily by bringing something new, but by producing something that American ears are used to listening to.
[00:14:18] And even with these hit stars, bands like One Direction and Little Mix or solo artists like Ed Sheeran or Adele, all of whom have achieved mainstream success in America, British music is simply not as popular any more, with one report suggesting that British artists only account for 7.6% of all music listened to in the United States.
[00:14:45] Why is this then?
[00:14:47] Well, perhaps you can point to increasing cultural differences, perhaps you can point to the fact that American culture is influenced by many other different cultures, British culture simply isn’t so exotic or attractive any more.
[00:15:03] Or there is also the fact that American record labels have realised that they can easily clone, copy, successful British pop groups. This is what happened with American boy-bands like N-Sync and the Backstreet Boys, which, in case you didn’t know, were both modelled on British boy bands that came before them, specifically Take That and East 17.
[00:15:28] This copying wasn’t possible with new, innovative groups like The Beatles or later Led Zeppelin, let’s say, bands that forged their own genres, but it’s perfectly possible with more generic groups that don’t write their own music anyway.
[00:15:45] Or perhaps, to continue answering the question of why British music isn’t so popular anymore, the simplistic but in my opinion most sensible explanation is the one you might think is most plausible to explain the success of The Beatles in America.
[00:16:02] The Beatles succeeded because they made fantastic music, music that is still listened to today.
[00:16:08] So, why aren’t British bands experiencing the same success?
[00:16:13] Well, the music simply isn’t good enough.
[00:16:17] Now, how I’d like to end this short exploration is by addressing the question of why, in an episode all about amazing music, you haven’t heard any.
[00:16:28] An annoying thing called copyright infringement means I can’t play you any tracks from any of these bands, but all I will say is that I hope that this might have inspired you to head straight to Spotify, or YouTube, your own record collection, or wherever you listen to your music, and fire up some Beatles or Rolling Stones, and experience this British Invasion for yourself.
[00:16:54] OK then, that is it for this short exploration of The British Invasion.
[00:17:00] I hope it's been an interesting one, and whether you are the world’s biggest Beatles fan, or if you didn’t know anything about this period at all, well I hope you've learnt something new.
[00:17:11] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:15] What are your favourite British bands, and why? Why do you think this British music of the 1960s and 1970s had such an outsized cultural impact?
[00:17:25] And, final question, what is the most underrated, the best but least known, band of this period one that everyone should know about?
[00:17:35] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:38] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:47] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:52] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something called “The British Invasion”.
[00:00:27] It was the period in the 1960s when British bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones arrived in America, changing the country’s musical scene, and leaving a legacy that would last, well, to this very day.
[00:00:42] It’s a fascinating story, the story of how British rock bands came to pack such a powerful punch, so let’s get right into it.
[00:00:53] February 9th, 1964, was in many ways a Sunday like any other.
[00:01:00] Tens of millions of Americans sat down in front of their television sets, ready for an evening of light entertainment.
[00:01:09] One of the most popular shows of the time was the Ed Sullivan Show, a family-friendly programme which ran from 1948 to 1971.
[00:01:21] That evening's show, however, would be unlike any other.
[00:01:27] For this show, the producers had booked four young men from Liverpool. Their names were Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They were, of course, The Beatles.
[00:01:43] As the young men took the stage, with their dark hair and dark suits, the crowd erupted into shrieks and wild applause.
[00:01:54] Only 728 tickets for the show had been made publicly available, and there had been more than 50,000 requests. A record breaking 73 million people, that's 34% of the entire US population, watched it on live TV. And according to one anecdote, during the time that The Beatles were live on The Ed Sullivan Show, not a single crime would be reported in New York City.
[00:02:26] That evening would kickstart what would come to be called “The British Invasion”, the domination of US musical culture by British groups, a domination that would go on for the best part of three decades.
[00:02:41] So, what happened, how did it get to this point, and what was the lasting legacy of this “invasion”?
[00:02:50] Well, first, some background.
[00:02:53] In terms of what was going on economically and culturally in Britain, as you may know, the post-war period was one characterised by struggle.
[00:03:04] Rationing, the government-imposed limiting of foods and other goods, only ended in 1954, almost 10 years after the end of the war. Britain was not a rich country; there was high unemployment, wage stagnation, life was not great for most people.
[00:03:24] Across the pond, in the United States, the recovery had been much quicker, and the United States had experienced an economic boom.
[00:03:33] With this came a new generation of singers and musicians, people like Elvis Presley, who you can learn all about in episode number 228 by the way.
[00:03:44] The US was the musical centre of the world, and young British people looked to America for inspiration. On a practical level, the US was also where the best instruments and recording technology were being made, so if you wanted to make great sounding music, American equipment was what you needed.
[00:04:06] Try as they might, young British musicians couldn’t really recreate the American sound. The UK didn’t have the same cultural influences as the US. There wasn’t blues or country music; Brits and Americans might speak the same language, but the underlying cultural differences were significant.
[00:04:31] So, what happened?
[00:04:33] Well, there was one American musical genre that young British musicians embraced almost as their own, giving it its own new lease of life.
[00:04:45] This was a type of music called “skiffle”. It’s a kind of folk music that originated in the United States, but was adopted by Brits in the 1950s.
[00:04:56] It only really required guitars and singing, so it was quite easy and cheap to make, which was important in a country that was still very much in recovery mode.
[00:05:08] One early skiffle band was called The Quarrymen.
[00:05:12] Now, unless you are a serious connoisseur of this period, you might not have heard of this band, but you’ll probably see where I’m going when I tell you that the founder of this band was a teenager called John Lennon, who in 1956 recruited his friends Paul McCartney and George Harrison to join the band with him.
[00:05:34] Yes, The Quarrymen was the band that turned into The Beatles.
[00:05:40] This “skiffle” genre started to get more and more popular, but it was still a British phenomenon, not really exported outside of the United Kingdom.
[00:05:51] And as you may know, The Beatles were far from an overnight success, they didn’t play together for the first time and just turn into immediate stars. That’s why you might not have heard about The Quarrymen.
[00:06:04] The band’s first iteration, The Quarrymen, was formed in 1956, the Beatles were only formed in 1960, and it wasn’t until 1963 that they had their first number one single, and they would have to wait another year, 1964, until they got to number 1 in the US charts.
[00:06:25] This episode isn’t specifically about The Beatles, so we won’t go into their story in great detail. But the point to remind you about is that they spent this going on ten-year period honing their craft and trying to get their big break playing thousands of hours in places like their hometown of Liverpool, as well as Hamburg, in Germany, before they released their big hit, Love Me Do, in 1962.
[00:06:54] Now, let’s fast forward to 1964, precisely, to February 9th of that year, when The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.
[00:07:05] It wasn’t The Beatles’ first TV appearance in the US, but it would be the most important, catapulting them to national prominence and stardom, and launching the cultural invasion of the United States by British bands.
[00:07:21] Now, why did this happen, you might be asking yourself, why were the Beatles so popular?
[00:07:28] Well, if you are a Beatles fan, you will probably answer this question by saying “well, they just made fantastic music, hit after hit, year after year, they were just that good. That’s why”.
[00:07:41] And of course, that is a perfectly valid point, but there are a few other factors that helped first The Beatles and then the British bands that followed.
[00:07:51] Firstly, this was the early 1960s, there was an increasing idea of “the teenager”, a particular period of one’s life when you were increasingly independent, perhaps rebellious, able to make your own choices, wanting to find people and bands that represented you. This isn’t specific to the British bands, but it gives you some idea about the increasing proportion of US society that was available to become hooked on British rock music.
[00:08:25] Secondly, and moving on to specific reasons about British bands and The Beatles themselves, The Beatles embodied youthful idealism, they were the perfect symbol for idealistic teenagers of the 1960s.
[00:08:39] For starters, they were young themselves.
[00:08:43] Ringo Starr, the oldest Beatle, was only 23 at the time of their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, and George Harrison wasn’t even 20.
[00:08:53] It wasn’t like American teenagers didn’t have any of these symbols already, but one of the most prominent symbols, President JFK, had been assassinated in November the year before, and the country was still reeling from the killing of its popular youthful President. The Beatles were perfectly positioned to fill this void.
[00:09:16] They sang about positive ideas, their music was inspiring and optimistic. They provided the musical equivalent of JFK’s inspirational speeches, so these four young men from Liverpool were exactly what the country needed, they were a new emblem of youthful idealism.
[00:09:36] And thirdly, American music at the time had become somewhat formulaic and tired. Elvis Presley had been going for 10 years, and the public were ready for something new and different.
[00:09:51] And to bring it back to 1964, on the eve of the Ed Sullivan Show, so-called Beatlemania had been going on in the UK since the previous year, since 1963.
[00:10:05] The band had been playing to sold-out venues and adoring crowds for much of the previous year, so it was only a matter of time before this infectious Beatlemania virus reached the shores of America.
[00:10:20] And when it did, in 1964, the American musical landscape was never the same again.
[00:10:27] In April of that year, The Beatles held all top five positions of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, something that no band had done before or has done since.
[00:10:40] It’s hard to overestimate quite how big they were, how much they dominated American music and culture in the 1960s.
[00:10:48] But of course, it wasn’t only The Beatles.
[00:10:52] They were followed by bands like The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Animals, and the Who, and solo artists like Tom Jones and Dusty Springfield.
[00:11:02] Not only were Americans now listening to a huge amount of British music, but American youth were emulating their favourite British singers. They dressed like them, they wore their hair like them and suddenly Britain, London, everything British, was cool.
[00:11:22] Britain was out of its post-war funk, or at least, to many American teenagers, British rock bands were the epitome of cool.
[00:11:33] It was dubbed “The British Invasion”. One day, there were practically no British bands that were popular in the US. But by the mid 1960s, the American charts were filled by British rock bands.
[00:11:47] What’s more, this “invasion”, and its subsequent cultural impact, kicked off a boom in new musical groups in the US. American singers took inspiration from this British style of music, which was of course in part influenced by American music.
[00:12:06] And the result of this, for some American groups and entire genres, was a complete collapse in popularity, people just didn’t want to listen to them anymore. In fact, some commentators have gone so far as to say that this British “invasion” destroyed American music.
[00:12:27] And the invasion continued, with a second wave in the late 1960s and early 1970s which included bands like Cream, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin.
[00:12:39] Sure, there were plenty of amazing homegrown bands, American groups, from the Jimi Hendrix Experience to Jefferson Airplane to Simon & Garfunkel.
[00:12:50] But ask 100 people, British or American, to name their favourite bands from the 1960s or 1970s, and I’d be very surprised if you didn’t find out that a high proportion of these bands were British, despite the country being less than a third of the size of the US in the 1960s.
[00:13:11] This domination, this success, this “British Invasion”, continued to a certain degree in the 1980s, with bands like Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran, but, as you will know, subsequent British bands have failed to emulate the success of their predecessors.
[00:13:30] If you think of big, cult British bands from the 1990s such as Oasis and Blur, whose rivalry you can learn about in episode number 124 by the way, they never experienced any real success in the US, certainly nothing remotely comparable to the British bands of the 1960s and 1970s.
[00:13:53] In more recent years, bands like One Direction and Ed Sheeran have achieved success stateside, but with music that is kind of indistinguishable from manufactured American pop music; their success is not necessarily by bringing something new, but by producing something that American ears are used to listening to.
[00:14:18] And even with these hit stars, bands like One Direction and Little Mix or solo artists like Ed Sheeran or Adele, all of whom have achieved mainstream success in America, British music is simply not as popular any more, with one report suggesting that British artists only account for 7.6% of all music listened to in the United States.
[00:14:45] Why is this then?
[00:14:47] Well, perhaps you can point to increasing cultural differences, perhaps you can point to the fact that American culture is influenced by many other different cultures, British culture simply isn’t so exotic or attractive any more.
[00:15:03] Or there is also the fact that American record labels have realised that they can easily clone, copy, successful British pop groups. This is what happened with American boy-bands like N-Sync and the Backstreet Boys, which, in case you didn’t know, were both modelled on British boy bands that came before them, specifically Take That and East 17.
[00:15:28] This copying wasn’t possible with new, innovative groups like The Beatles or later Led Zeppelin, let’s say, bands that forged their own genres, but it’s perfectly possible with more generic groups that don’t write their own music anyway.
[00:15:45] Or perhaps, to continue answering the question of why British music isn’t so popular anymore, the simplistic but in my opinion most sensible explanation is the one you might think is most plausible to explain the success of The Beatles in America.
[00:16:02] The Beatles succeeded because they made fantastic music, music that is still listened to today.
[00:16:08] So, why aren’t British bands experiencing the same success?
[00:16:13] Well, the music simply isn’t good enough.
[00:16:17] Now, how I’d like to end this short exploration is by addressing the question of why, in an episode all about amazing music, you haven’t heard any.
[00:16:28] An annoying thing called copyright infringement means I can’t play you any tracks from any of these bands, but all I will say is that I hope that this might have inspired you to head straight to Spotify, or YouTube, your own record collection, or wherever you listen to your music, and fire up some Beatles or Rolling Stones, and experience this British Invasion for yourself.
[00:16:54] OK then, that is it for this short exploration of The British Invasion.
[00:17:00] I hope it's been an interesting one, and whether you are the world’s biggest Beatles fan, or if you didn’t know anything about this period at all, well I hope you've learnt something new.
[00:17:11] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:15] What are your favourite British bands, and why? Why do you think this British music of the 1960s and 1970s had such an outsized cultural impact?
[00:17:25] And, final question, what is the most underrated, the best but least known, band of this period one that everyone should know about?
[00:17:35] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:38] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:47] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:52] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something called “The British Invasion”.
[00:00:27] It was the period in the 1960s when British bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones arrived in America, changing the country’s musical scene, and leaving a legacy that would last, well, to this very day.
[00:00:42] It’s a fascinating story, the story of how British rock bands came to pack such a powerful punch, so let’s get right into it.
[00:00:53] February 9th, 1964, was in many ways a Sunday like any other.
[00:01:00] Tens of millions of Americans sat down in front of their television sets, ready for an evening of light entertainment.
[00:01:09] One of the most popular shows of the time was the Ed Sullivan Show, a family-friendly programme which ran from 1948 to 1971.
[00:01:21] That evening's show, however, would be unlike any other.
[00:01:27] For this show, the producers had booked four young men from Liverpool. Their names were Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They were, of course, The Beatles.
[00:01:43] As the young men took the stage, with their dark hair and dark suits, the crowd erupted into shrieks and wild applause.
[00:01:54] Only 728 tickets for the show had been made publicly available, and there had been more than 50,000 requests. A record breaking 73 million people, that's 34% of the entire US population, watched it on live TV. And according to one anecdote, during the time that The Beatles were live on The Ed Sullivan Show, not a single crime would be reported in New York City.
[00:02:26] That evening would kickstart what would come to be called “The British Invasion”, the domination of US musical culture by British groups, a domination that would go on for the best part of three decades.
[00:02:41] So, what happened, how did it get to this point, and what was the lasting legacy of this “invasion”?
[00:02:50] Well, first, some background.
[00:02:53] In terms of what was going on economically and culturally in Britain, as you may know, the post-war period was one characterised by struggle.
[00:03:04] Rationing, the government-imposed limiting of foods and other goods, only ended in 1954, almost 10 years after the end of the war. Britain was not a rich country; there was high unemployment, wage stagnation, life was not great for most people.
[00:03:24] Across the pond, in the United States, the recovery had been much quicker, and the United States had experienced an economic boom.
[00:03:33] With this came a new generation of singers and musicians, people like Elvis Presley, who you can learn all about in episode number 228 by the way.
[00:03:44] The US was the musical centre of the world, and young British people looked to America for inspiration. On a practical level, the US was also where the best instruments and recording technology were being made, so if you wanted to make great sounding music, American equipment was what you needed.
[00:04:06] Try as they might, young British musicians couldn’t really recreate the American sound. The UK didn’t have the same cultural influences as the US. There wasn’t blues or country music; Brits and Americans might speak the same language, but the underlying cultural differences were significant.
[00:04:31] So, what happened?
[00:04:33] Well, there was one American musical genre that young British musicians embraced almost as their own, giving it its own new lease of life.
[00:04:45] This was a type of music called “skiffle”. It’s a kind of folk music that originated in the United States, but was adopted by Brits in the 1950s.
[00:04:56] It only really required guitars and singing, so it was quite easy and cheap to make, which was important in a country that was still very much in recovery mode.
[00:05:08] One early skiffle band was called The Quarrymen.
[00:05:12] Now, unless you are a serious connoisseur of this period, you might not have heard of this band, but you’ll probably see where I’m going when I tell you that the founder of this band was a teenager called John Lennon, who in 1956 recruited his friends Paul McCartney and George Harrison to join the band with him.
[00:05:34] Yes, The Quarrymen was the band that turned into The Beatles.
[00:05:40] This “skiffle” genre started to get more and more popular, but it was still a British phenomenon, not really exported outside of the United Kingdom.
[00:05:51] And as you may know, The Beatles were far from an overnight success, they didn’t play together for the first time and just turn into immediate stars. That’s why you might not have heard about The Quarrymen.
[00:06:04] The band’s first iteration, The Quarrymen, was formed in 1956, the Beatles were only formed in 1960, and it wasn’t until 1963 that they had their first number one single, and they would have to wait another year, 1964, until they got to number 1 in the US charts.
[00:06:25] This episode isn’t specifically about The Beatles, so we won’t go into their story in great detail. But the point to remind you about is that they spent this going on ten-year period honing their craft and trying to get their big break playing thousands of hours in places like their hometown of Liverpool, as well as Hamburg, in Germany, before they released their big hit, Love Me Do, in 1962.
[00:06:54] Now, let’s fast forward to 1964, precisely, to February 9th of that year, when The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.
[00:07:05] It wasn’t The Beatles’ first TV appearance in the US, but it would be the most important, catapulting them to national prominence and stardom, and launching the cultural invasion of the United States by British bands.
[00:07:21] Now, why did this happen, you might be asking yourself, why were the Beatles so popular?
[00:07:28] Well, if you are a Beatles fan, you will probably answer this question by saying “well, they just made fantastic music, hit after hit, year after year, they were just that good. That’s why”.
[00:07:41] And of course, that is a perfectly valid point, but there are a few other factors that helped first The Beatles and then the British bands that followed.
[00:07:51] Firstly, this was the early 1960s, there was an increasing idea of “the teenager”, a particular period of one’s life when you were increasingly independent, perhaps rebellious, able to make your own choices, wanting to find people and bands that represented you. This isn’t specific to the British bands, but it gives you some idea about the increasing proportion of US society that was available to become hooked on British rock music.
[00:08:25] Secondly, and moving on to specific reasons about British bands and The Beatles themselves, The Beatles embodied youthful idealism, they were the perfect symbol for idealistic teenagers of the 1960s.
[00:08:39] For starters, they were young themselves.
[00:08:43] Ringo Starr, the oldest Beatle, was only 23 at the time of their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, and George Harrison wasn’t even 20.
[00:08:53] It wasn’t like American teenagers didn’t have any of these symbols already, but one of the most prominent symbols, President JFK, had been assassinated in November the year before, and the country was still reeling from the killing of its popular youthful President. The Beatles were perfectly positioned to fill this void.
[00:09:16] They sang about positive ideas, their music was inspiring and optimistic. They provided the musical equivalent of JFK’s inspirational speeches, so these four young men from Liverpool were exactly what the country needed, they were a new emblem of youthful idealism.
[00:09:36] And thirdly, American music at the time had become somewhat formulaic and tired. Elvis Presley had been going for 10 years, and the public were ready for something new and different.
[00:09:51] And to bring it back to 1964, on the eve of the Ed Sullivan Show, so-called Beatlemania had been going on in the UK since the previous year, since 1963.
[00:10:05] The band had been playing to sold-out venues and adoring crowds for much of the previous year, so it was only a matter of time before this infectious Beatlemania virus reached the shores of America.
[00:10:20] And when it did, in 1964, the American musical landscape was never the same again.
[00:10:27] In April of that year, The Beatles held all top five positions of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, something that no band had done before or has done since.
[00:10:40] It’s hard to overestimate quite how big they were, how much they dominated American music and culture in the 1960s.
[00:10:48] But of course, it wasn’t only The Beatles.
[00:10:52] They were followed by bands like The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Animals, and the Who, and solo artists like Tom Jones and Dusty Springfield.
[00:11:02] Not only were Americans now listening to a huge amount of British music, but American youth were emulating their favourite British singers. They dressed like them, they wore their hair like them and suddenly Britain, London, everything British, was cool.
[00:11:22] Britain was out of its post-war funk, or at least, to many American teenagers, British rock bands were the epitome of cool.
[00:11:33] It was dubbed “The British Invasion”. One day, there were practically no British bands that were popular in the US. But by the mid 1960s, the American charts were filled by British rock bands.
[00:11:47] What’s more, this “invasion”, and its subsequent cultural impact, kicked off a boom in new musical groups in the US. American singers took inspiration from this British style of music, which was of course in part influenced by American music.
[00:12:06] And the result of this, for some American groups and entire genres, was a complete collapse in popularity, people just didn’t want to listen to them anymore. In fact, some commentators have gone so far as to say that this British “invasion” destroyed American music.
[00:12:27] And the invasion continued, with a second wave in the late 1960s and early 1970s which included bands like Cream, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin.
[00:12:39] Sure, there were plenty of amazing homegrown bands, American groups, from the Jimi Hendrix Experience to Jefferson Airplane to Simon & Garfunkel.
[00:12:50] But ask 100 people, British or American, to name their favourite bands from the 1960s or 1970s, and I’d be very surprised if you didn’t find out that a high proportion of these bands were British, despite the country being less than a third of the size of the US in the 1960s.
[00:13:11] This domination, this success, this “British Invasion”, continued to a certain degree in the 1980s, with bands like Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran, but, as you will know, subsequent British bands have failed to emulate the success of their predecessors.
[00:13:30] If you think of big, cult British bands from the 1990s such as Oasis and Blur, whose rivalry you can learn about in episode number 124 by the way, they never experienced any real success in the US, certainly nothing remotely comparable to the British bands of the 1960s and 1970s.
[00:13:53] In more recent years, bands like One Direction and Ed Sheeran have achieved success stateside, but with music that is kind of indistinguishable from manufactured American pop music; their success is not necessarily by bringing something new, but by producing something that American ears are used to listening to.
[00:14:18] And even with these hit stars, bands like One Direction and Little Mix or solo artists like Ed Sheeran or Adele, all of whom have achieved mainstream success in America, British music is simply not as popular any more, with one report suggesting that British artists only account for 7.6% of all music listened to in the United States.
[00:14:45] Why is this then?
[00:14:47] Well, perhaps you can point to increasing cultural differences, perhaps you can point to the fact that American culture is influenced by many other different cultures, British culture simply isn’t so exotic or attractive any more.
[00:15:03] Or there is also the fact that American record labels have realised that they can easily clone, copy, successful British pop groups. This is what happened with American boy-bands like N-Sync and the Backstreet Boys, which, in case you didn’t know, were both modelled on British boy bands that came before them, specifically Take That and East 17.
[00:15:28] This copying wasn’t possible with new, innovative groups like The Beatles or later Led Zeppelin, let’s say, bands that forged their own genres, but it’s perfectly possible with more generic groups that don’t write their own music anyway.
[00:15:45] Or perhaps, to continue answering the question of why British music isn’t so popular anymore, the simplistic but in my opinion most sensible explanation is the one you might think is most plausible to explain the success of The Beatles in America.
[00:16:02] The Beatles succeeded because they made fantastic music, music that is still listened to today.
[00:16:08] So, why aren’t British bands experiencing the same success?
[00:16:13] Well, the music simply isn’t good enough.
[00:16:17] Now, how I’d like to end this short exploration is by addressing the question of why, in an episode all about amazing music, you haven’t heard any.
[00:16:28] An annoying thing called copyright infringement means I can’t play you any tracks from any of these bands, but all I will say is that I hope that this might have inspired you to head straight to Spotify, or YouTube, your own record collection, or wherever you listen to your music, and fire up some Beatles or Rolling Stones, and experience this British Invasion for yourself.
[00:16:54] OK then, that is it for this short exploration of The British Invasion.
[00:17:00] I hope it's been an interesting one, and whether you are the world’s biggest Beatles fan, or if you didn’t know anything about this period at all, well I hope you've learnt something new.
[00:17:11] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:15] What are your favourite British bands, and why? Why do you think this British music of the 1960s and 1970s had such an outsized cultural impact?
[00:17:25] And, final question, what is the most underrated, the best but least known, band of this period one that everyone should know about?
[00:17:35] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:38] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:47] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:52] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
