Beatlemania

• 1. Introduction

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  Beatlemania gripped Britain in the autumn of 1963, when 15 million people watched four young men from Liverpool perform on the UK's top variety show and a national newspaper coined a single word to describe what had happened. That word was Beatlemania. What followed over the next three years would be unlike anything the modern world had seen: a phenomenon that paralysed airports, filled stadiums of 55,000, moved a crowd of 300,000 in a single Australian city, and drew the earnest attention of psychologists, sociologists, Christian ministers, and members of Parliament. How did a pop group inspire scenes compared to both Nuremberg rallies and women's liberation protests? And why, when the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, did one member say that four years of Beatlemania had been enough for anyone? The story begins not at the London Palladium, but in a club in Liverpool, several years before most of the world had ever heard the name.

• 2. Before the Word Existed

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  Bob Wooler, who regularly presented the Beatles at Liverpool's Cavern Club, wrote in August 1961 that the group were "the stuff that screams are made of" and were already playing to "fever-pitch audiences". Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn notes that some attendees of the band's the 27th of December 1960 show in Litherland believe Beatlemania was "born" there. National recognition, however, was still years away.

  The band's second single, "Please Please Me", propelled them into demand across the whole of 1963. It reached number two on the Record Retailer chart and topped both the NME and Melody Maker charts. When the Beatles opened their first nationwide tour on the 2nd of February 1963 at a Bradford show headlined by 16-year-old Helen Shapiro, journalist Gordon Sampson noted that "a great reception went to the colourfully dressed Beatles, who almost stole the show", with the audience repeatedly calling for them while other artists were still performing. On a subsequent tour headlined by American stars Tommy Roe and Chris Montez, the crowds persistently screamed for the Beatles instead, marking the first time that a homegrown act had outshone visiting American stars. The Beatles felt embarrassment for the Americans at every show.

  On their third nationwide tour in May, the bill was headed by Roy Orbison, who had four UK top-ten hits to his name. He proved less popular than the Beatles at the opening show at the Adelphi Cinema in Slough. A week into the tour, the souvenir program covers were reprinted to place the Beatles above Orbison. Drummer Ringo Starr was still awed by Orbison's command of his audience, saying: "We would be backstage, listening to the tremendous applause he was getting. He was just doing it by his voice. Just standing there singing, not moving or anything." By the end of the month, the Beatles had their first number one on the Record Retailer chart with "From Me to You".

• 3. The Word Is Coined

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  Thousands of fans ordered the Beatles' fourth single, "She Loves You", as early as June 1963, before its title had even been made public. In July, when the band gathered at EMI Studios for the recording session, more than a hundred fans gathered outside and dozens broke through a police blockade to swarm the building. By the day before the single went on sale in August, 500,000 advance orders had been placed. The song topped the charts and set several UK sales records. Its "Yeah, yeah, yeah" refrain became a signature hook for European audiences; the falsetto "Ooh!"s, accompanied by the vocalists shaking their moptop hair, produced further waves of fan delirium.

  On the 13th of October, the band starred on Val Parnell's Sunday Night at the London Palladium, watched live by 15 million viewers. Within days, one national paper's headlines coined the term "Beatlemania". Scottish music promoter Andi Lothian separately claims he coined the word while speaking to a reporter at the band's Caird Hall concert on the 7th of October. The word appeared in the Daily Mail on the 21st of October in a feature by Vincent Mulchrone headlined "This Beatlemania". Publicist Tony Barrow pinpointed the Palladium appearance as the moment he stopped calling the press and the press started calling him.

  When the Beatles returned from a seven-day concert tour of five Swedish cities on the 31st of October, 10,000 screaming fans, 50 journalists and photographers, and a BBC TV camera crew met them at London Airport in heavy rain. The wild scenes delayed British Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, whose car was obstructed by the crowds. Miss World was passing through the airport at the same time and was completely ignored by both journalists and the public. Ed Sullivan, also caught in the delay, asked: "Who the hell are the Beatles?"

• 4. The Autumn That Changed Britain

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  On the 1st of November, the Beatles began their 1963 Autumn Tour, their first as undisputed headliners. At the opening date, at the Odeon in Cheltenham, the screaming crowds were so loud that the band's amplification equipment failed to keep up; the members could not hear themselves speaking, singing, or playing. The Daily Mirror ran the headline: "BEATLEMANIA! It's happening everywhere... even in sedate Cheltenham". The Daily Telegraph published a disapproving piece likening the scenes to Hitler's Nuremberg Rallies. Police employed high-pressure water hoses to control crowds, and the safety of officers became a matter of national concern, provoking debate in Parliament over the thousands of police putting themselves at risk.

  Actor Maureen Lipman attended a concert in Hull as a sceptic. Fifty years later she recalled her "road to Damascus moment" when Lennon sang "Money (That's What I Want)": "Someone very close to me screamed the most piercing of screams, a primal mating call... I realised with an electric shock that the screaming someone was me." She heard that the theatre "cleared away 40 pairs of abandoned knickers" from other young female fans and concluded that "life, as I knew it, was never the same again."

  The tour continued until the 13th of December, with stops in Dublin and Belfast, and is described by Lewisohn as the "pinnacle of British Beatlemania". On 21 and the 22nd of December, the band gave preview performances of The Beatles' Christmas Show in Bradford and Liverpool. From the 24th of December to the 11th of January 1964, the show ran twice daily at the Finsbury Park Astoria in north London. Author Nicholas Schaffner, a teenager during the 1960s, said that the Beatles' annual Christmas LP releases came to "evoke an intangible sense of Christmas" for many listeners.

• 5. America Falls

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  The American press initially greeted the UK's Beatlemania with amusement, filing stories about British eccentricity. Headlines included "The New Madness" and "Beatle Bug Bites Britain"; the Baltimore Sun suggested that "A restrained 'Beatles go home' might be just the thing." Rather than dampening American teenagers' interest, adult disapproval strengthened their connection with the band.

  American chart success began after disc jockey Carroll James obtained a British pressing of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in mid-December and started playing it on AM radio station WWDC in Washington, DC. Listeners phoned in repeatedly to request replays. Local record shops were flooded with requests for a record they did not stock. James sent copies to disc jockeys across the country, sparking the same reaction. Capitol released the record three weeks ahead of schedule on the 26th of December. It sold a million copies and reached number one in the US by mid-January.

  On the 7th of February, an estimated 4,000 fans were at Heathrow Airport as Pan Am Flight 101 departed with the Beatles on board, along with Phil Spector and a party of photographers and journalists. At New York's newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport, another 4,000 fans and 200 journalists were waiting. The Beatles made their first live US television appearance on the 9th of February on The Ed Sullivan Show, watched by 73 million viewers, about two-fifths of the American population. According to Nielsen ratings, it was the largest audience recorded for an American television program at that time. Their first American concert, on the 11th of February at Washington Coliseum, drew 8,000; the next day at Carnegie Hall, 2,000 attended. Their second Ed Sullivan appearance on the 16th of February, broadcast live from the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, drew another 70 million viewers.

  By the 4th of April, the group occupied the top five positions in the US singles chart, as well as seven other positions in the Billboard Hot 100. Author David Szatmary calculated that in the nine days of the Beatles' brief first visit, Americans bought more than two million Beatles records and more than 2.5 million dollars worth of Beatles-related goods. An article in The New York Times Magazine described Beatlemania as a "religion of teenage culture", linking the public shock of President Kennedy's assassination on the 22nd of November 1963 to the intensity of the adulation afforded the Beatles eleven weeks later.

• 6. Stadiums and Mania at Scale

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  On the 15th of August 1965, the Beatles opened their US tour at Shea Stadium in New York City, playing to an audience of over 55,000, the largest of any concert they ever performed. The circular stadium, constructed the previous year with seating across four ascending decks, had never been used for this purpose before. Takings reached $304,000. According to The New York Times, the collective scream from the audience escalated to what the paper called "the classic Greek meaning of the word pandemonium". Lennon responded by acting in a mock-crazed manner and reducing Harrison to hysterical laughter as they played the closing song, "I'm Down". Starr later said: "I feel that on that show John cracked up... playing the piano with his elbows."

  The scale of the overseas tours had by this point taken on dimensions that resembled military operations. Travelling to venues involved helicopters and armoured cars. Fans besieged the band's hotels; sheets and pillowcases were stolen as souvenirs. During the 1964 world tour in Australia, a crowd of 300,000, roughly half the population of Adelaide, gathered to greet the band on the 12th of June. It was the largest recorded gathering of Australians in one place, twice the number who had greeted Queen Elizabeth II on her royal visit the previous year. In Melbourne on the 14th of June, 50 people were hospitalised, some having fallen from trees in an attempt to see the band. During the first concert in Sydney on the 18th of June, the audience's habit of hurling Jelly Babies at the stage, a legacy of George Harrison having mentioned he liked them, forced the band to stop the show twice.

  George Martin, the band's record producer, assisted in taping the 23rd of August Hollywood Bowl concert during the 1964 US tour. He said recording amid the relentless screaming was "like putting a microphone at the end of a 747 jet". A local policeman in Chicago on the 5th of September described the adulation as "kind of like Sinatra multiplied by 50 or 100". The tour earned the group over a million dollars in ticket sales alone.

• 7. The Breaking Point

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  John Lennon's remark in early 1966 that the Beatles had become "more popular than Jesus" caused no public reaction when originally published in the UK in March. In the US it triggered an explosion of protest. By the time the band arrived for their final tour in August, following the release of Revolver, Beatle records were being publicly burned, concerts were picketed by the Ku Klux Klan, and their manager Brian Epstein had considered cancelling the 14-date tour over fears for the band's lives. One performance was halted temporarily when a firecracker was thrown, causing the band to believe they were being shot at.

  The tour ended on the 29th of August at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Rows of empty seats appeared at some venues, and author Nicholas Schaffner noted that "The screaming had also abated somewhat, one could occasionally even hear snatches of music." Offstage, Harrison had been the first to grow tired of touring, while McCartney had continued to thrive on the adulation. McCartney finally agreed to stop touring near the end of the 1966 tour. Lennon said their concerts had become "bloody tribal rites" where crowds came merely to scream. Harrison later likened Beatlemania to the premise of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, "where you are sane in the middle of something and they're all crackers". Starr concluded that they gave up "at the right time", since "Four years of Beatlemania was enough for anyone."

  The band had performed over 1,400 shows worldwide across those four years. The group's retreat to the studio did not extinguish public fascination; in late August 1967, 2,000 fans protested outside Shea Stadium at the band's failure to perform in the US that summer. The last mass display of fan adulation took place at the world premiere of Yellow Submarine at the London Pavilion on the 17th of July 1968, when fans as usual brought traffic to a standstill and blocked the streets of Piccadilly Circus.

• 8. What It Left Behind

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  A 1997 study titled "Beatlemania: A sexually defiant consumer subculture?" formally recognised the phenomenon as an early demonstration of proto-feminist girl power. Authors Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs, writing in their 1986 book Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex, observed that photos and footage of young female Beatles fans in confrontation with police could as easily be mistaken for a women's liberation demonstration from the late 1960s. They argued that Beatlemania was "the first mass outburst of the '60s to feature women" and "the emergence of a genuinely political movement for women's liberation." Press officer Derek Taylor described the relationship between the Beatles and their fans as "the twentieth century's greatest romance."

  The first UK act after the Beatles to draw comparable fan frenzy was T.Rex, a glam-rock group led by Marc Bolan. In the early 1970s, their following earned the names "Bolanmania" and "T.Rextasy". The British press later coined "Rollermania" for the fan culture surrounding the Bay City Rollers. Writing in The Observer in 2013, Dorian Lynskey identified the recurring tropes: "the screaming, the queuing, the waiting, the longing, the trophy-collecting, the craving for even the briefest contact." Author André Millard writes that, just as Beatlemania's "scale and ferocity" far surpassed the scenes of adulation inspired by Sinatra, Presley, and Johnnie Ray, "nobody in popular entertainment has been able to repeat this moment in all its economic and cultural significance."

  The receptions of subsequent pop acts, particularly boy bands and Taylor Swift, have regularly drawn comparisons to Beatlemania. Yet authors David Luhrssen and Michael Larson note that while boy bands continue to attract audiences of screaming fans, "none of those acts moved pop culture forward or achieved the breadth and depth of the Beatles' fandom." The measure set at Shea Stadium on the 15th of August 1965, when the ground shook with the sound of 55,000 people, remains a reference point for every mass cultural phenomenon that has followed.