The Beatles

• 1. Introduction

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  The Beatles formed in Liverpool in 1960, and within four years an estimated 73 million Americans watched four young men from northern England play on a single television broadcast. That figure represented 34 per cent of the American population. The band comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, and they are regarded as the most influential band in popular music. How did a group that began playing strip clubs in a German red-light district come to be called the most successful act in the history of the US Billboard charts? What turned four touring musicians, exhausted by screaming crowds, into the artists who built an album in over 700 hours of studio time? And what tensions, drawn out across a single tense decade, finally pulled them apart? The questions begin in a Liverpool school hall and end with a signature on dissolution papers at a Florida resort.

• 2. From Quarrymen To Beatles

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  In November 1956, sixteen-year-old John Lennon formed a skiffle group with friends from Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool. They called themselves the Quarrymen, after their school song, "Quarry men old before our birth". Fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney met Lennon on the 6th of July 1957 and joined soon after as a rhythm guitarist. In February 1958, McCartney invited his friend George Harrison, then fifteen, to watch the band, and Harrison auditioned for Lennon. Lennon initially thought Harrison too young. After a month's persistence, Harrison performed the lead guitar part of the instrumental "Raunchy" on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, and the others enlisted him as lead guitarist. By January 1959 Lennon's Quarry Bank friends had left, and the three guitarists billed themselves variously as Johnny and the Moondogs and the Rainbows. McCartney later explained that last name to New Musical Express: "because we all had different coloured shirts and we couldn't afford any others!" Lennon's art school friend Stuart Sutcliffe joined in January 1960, having bought a bass guitar with the proceeds of selling one of his paintings. He suggested the name Beatals, a tribute to Buddy Holly and the Crickets. They became the Silver Beetles, then the Silver Beatles, and by mid-August 1960 simply the Beatles.

• 3. The Hamburg Crucible

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  Allan Williams, the band's unofficial manager, arranged a residency in Hamburg, and they hired drummer Pete Best in mid-August 1960 before departing Liverpool. Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn writes that they pulled into Hamburg at dusk on the 17th of August, when the red-light area came to life, with flashing neon lights and scantily clad women in shop windows. Club owner Bruno Koschmider placed them at the Indra Club, then moved them to the Kaiserkeller. When he learned they had played the rival Top Ten Club, he reported the underage Harrison, who had lied to German authorities about his age, and Harrison was deported in late November. A week later Koschmider had McCartney and Best arrested for arson after they set fire to a condom in a concrete corridor, and they too were deported. Photographer Astrid Kirchherr, Sutcliffe's German fiancee, took the first semi-professional photos of the band. In 1961 she cut Sutcliffe's hair in the existentialist "exi" style, later adopted by the others. Across these years the Beatles used Preludin to maintain energy through all-night sets. Sutcliffe left the band in 1961 to resume his art studies, and McCartney took over bass. The four-piece backed Tony Sheridan for producer Bert Kaempfert, and their single "My Bonnie", credited to Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, reached number 32 on the Musikmarkt chart.

• 4. Epstein, Martin And The First Hits

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  In November 1961, at the Cavern Club, the Beatles met Brian Epstein, a local record-store owner and music columnist. He recalled liking what he heard at once: "They were fresh, and they were honest, and they had what I thought was a sort of presence... a star quality." They appointed him manager in January 1962, and Decca Records rejected them with the line, "Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein". Three months later, producer George Martin signed them to EMI's Parlophone label. On their return to Germany in April 1962, Kirchherr met them at the airport with news of Sutcliffe's death the previous day from a brain haemorrhage. Martin's first session with the band took place in London on the 6th of June 1962. He complained about Best's drumming, and in mid-August the Beatles replaced Best with Ringo Starr, who left Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to join them. Martin, still dissatisfied, hired session drummer Andy White for a later date, which produced recordings of "Love Me Do", "Please Please Me" and "P.S. I Love You". Released in early October 1962, "Love Me Do" peaked at number 17 on the Record Retailer chart. Of the retempo'd "Please Please Me", Martin predicted accurately, "You've just made your first No. 1". Epstein pushed them toward professionalism. 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."

• 5. Beatlemania

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  On the 13th of October 1963, the Beatles starred on Sunday Night at the London Palladium before 15 million television viewers. A national paper coined the term "Beatlemania" to describe the screaming fans, and it stuck. Their debut LP, Please Please Me, was recorded in a single marathon session of ten songs on the 11th of February 1963, and it became the first of eleven consecutive UK number-one Beatles albums. The single "She Loves You", issued in August, sold three-quarters of a million copies in under four weeks and remained the biggest-selling record in the UK until 1978. As Beatlemania intensified, police in Plymouth used high-pressure water hoses to control the crowd before a concert. On the 4th of November 1963 the band played the Royal Variety Performance before The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. With the Beatles, released on the 22nd of November to advance orders of 270,000 copies, became the second album in UK chart history to sell a million, a figure previously reached only by the 1958 South Pacific soundtrack. Press officer Tony Barrow described them in his sleeve notes as the "fabulous foursome", which the media adopted as "the Fab Four". Music critic William Mann of The Times called Lennon and McCartney "the outstanding English composers of 1963", lending the music respectability.

• 6. Conquering America

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  On the 7th of February 1964, the Beatles departed Heathrow with an estimated 4,000 fans waving as the aircraft took off, and an uproarious crowd of around 3,000 met them at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. Two days later they performed on The Ed Sullivan Show before roughly 73 million viewers across more than 23 million households. Biographer Jonathan Gould records the Nielsen service calling it the largest audience ever recorded for an American television program. Capitol Records had hindered their US releases for more than a year before disc jockey Carroll James of WWDC in Washington began playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in mid-December 1963. Demand surged, Capitol moved up the release, and the single sold a million copies. The visit came as the nation still mourned the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the previous November, and commentators suggest the performances reignited a sense of excitement for the young. During the week of the 4th of April 1964, the Beatles held twelve positions on the Billboard Hot 100, including the top five. Their long hairstyle, mocked by many adults, became an emblem of rebellion. Their success opened the door for the British Invasion, with acts such as the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, the Kinks and the Rolling Stones following them into America.

• 7. A Stand And A New Influence

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  When informed that the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida, was segregated for their the 11th of September 1964 concert, the Beatles refused to perform unless the audience was integrated. Lennon stated: "We never play to segregated audiences and we aren't going to start now... I'd sooner lose our appearance money." City officials relented, and the group also cancelled their reservations at the whites-only Hotel George Washington. For their 1965 and 1966 US tours, the band wrote clauses into contracts stipulating that shows be integrated. In August 1964, journalist Al Aronowitz arranged for the Beatles to meet Bob Dylan in their New York hotel suite, where Dylan introduced them to cannabis. Gould notes the cultural weight of this meeting, since the two fan bases were perceived as inhabiting separate subcultural worlds. Within six months, Gould writes, Lennon was making records on which he openly imitated Dylan's nasal drone and introspective vocal persona. Six months after that, Dylan began performing with a backing band and electric instrumentation. The traditional division between folk and rock enthusiasts, Gould continues, nearly evaporated. That blurring of audiences would shape the more philosophical records the band was about to make.

• 8. The Studio Becomes The Instrument

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  A 12-string electric Rickenbacker, a prototype given to Harrison by the manufacturer, produced the ringing guitar sound that debuted on A Hard Day's Night in 1964. The film, directed by Richard Lester, drew comparisons with the Marx Brothers and was an international success. Drugs increasingly shaped the work. In early 1965, Harrison's dentist secretly added LSD to the coffee of Lennon and Harrison; Lennon called the experience "just terrifying, but it was fantastic". Lennon later referred to Rubber Soul, released in December 1965, as "the pot album", and Harrison's introduction of a sitar on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" pushed the band outside traditional pop boundaries. McCartney's "Yesterday", on which none of the other Beatles perform, has inspired the most cover versions of any song ever written. Engineer Geoff Emerick recalled that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, recorded over more than 700 hours, demanded that everything be different, with microphones placed down in the bells of brass instruments. Parts of "A Day in the Life" featured a 40-piece orchestra. Released in May 1967, it topped the UK charts for 23 consecutive weeks and became the first rock album to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. The album was the first major pop or rock LP to print its complete lyrics on the back cover.

  On the 27th of August 1967, the group learned that Brian Epstein had died, ruled an accidental carbitol overdose. Lennon recalled the moment plainly: "We collapsed. I knew that we were in trouble then." Without Epstein, the band drifted. In February 1968 they travelled to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in Rishikesh, India, for a meditation course that proved one of their most prolific writing periods. Lennon left abruptly after allegations against the Maharishi and wrote a scathing song titled "Maharishi", renamed "Sexy Sadie" to avoid legal issues. That same year they founded Apple Corps, which McCartney described as "rather like a Western communism" and which Harrison said descended into chaos as John and Paul "blew millions". Relations soured further during the White Album sessions, when Starr quit for two weeks and Lennon scorned McCartney's "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" as "granny music shit". Their final live performance was filmed on the rooftop of the Apple Corps building at 3 Savile Row, London, on the 30th of January 1969. Abbey Road, released on the 26th of September 1969, sold four million copies within three months. McCartney publicly announced his departure on the 10th of April 1970, and Let It Be was released the following month, later winning the 1970 Academy Award for Best Original Song Score. The legal dissolution was not formalised until the 29th of December 1974, when Lennon signed the paperwork on vacation with his family at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.