The Beatles

The story

Four lads from Liverpool

Liverpool is a port city in the north of England. In the 1950s, in its working-class streets, many boys played the guitar, copying the rock and roll that came from America. On 6 July 1957, at a church fête, a sixteen-year-old called John Lennon was playing with his band, the Quarrymen. In the audience was a fifteen-year-old boy, Paul McCartney, who could tune a guitar better than he could. After that meeting Paul was invited into the group; soon afterwards George Harrison, the youngest of them all, joined too.

The three boys changed their name several times, and in the end they chose “The Beatles”, a play on words between “beetles” and “beat”, the rhythm. A series of musicians took turns on the drums, until in the summer of 1962 Ringo Starr arrived, whose real name was Richard Starkey. This was the line-up the world would come to know: Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starr.

The Hamburg school and the Cavern

Before becoming famous, the Beatles spent months playing in clubs in Hamburg, in Germany, in the port district. They played for many hours every night, even eight, in small crowded clubs: it was a real school, which made them a tight and tireless band. Back in Liverpool, they played at the Cavern Club, a damp cellar with an arched ceiling, where a queue formed to get in every day.

It was there that, in 1961, they were noticed by Brian Epstein, the young manager of a record shop. Struck by their energy, he became their manager: he persuaded them to wear matching jackets and to move politely on stage. Soon afterwards they met a record producer, George Martin, who knew how to give order to their experiments. In October 1962 their first record came out, “Love Me Do”.

1963: “Beatlemania”

The real breakthrough came in 1963. The single “Please Please Me” climbed to the top places of the British charts. In February the Beatles recorded almost all of their first album, “Please Please Me”, in a single day, in about ten hours, with an energy you can still hear today. Then came “From Me to You” and “She Loves You”, which became the best-selling song of that year in England. The chorus, with its shouted “yeah, yeah, yeah”, stuck in the heads of millions of people.

From 1963 girls and boys waited for them in crowds outside hotels, screamed at concerts so loudly that they drowned out the music and chased the cars in which the band travelled. The newspapers coined a word: “Beatlemania”, the craze for the Beatles. On 4 November 1963 they played in front of the royal family, and Lennon joked with the audience: “Those in the cheaper seats, clap your hands. The rest of you, just rattle your jewellery.” In February 1964 they appeared on American television, on the Ed Sullivan Show, and were watched by about seventy million people. It was the “British Invasion”: after them, other English bands, such as the Rolling Stones, conquered the United States.

From music to cinema, and beyond

The Beatles were not content with repeating the formula for success. They made films, such as “A Hard Day's Night” (1964), with the pace of a comedy, and from 1965 they experimented with new sounds, Indian instruments such as the sitar, tapes edited backwards and an orchestra in the studio. In 1967 they released “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”, considered one of the most influential records in history. In 1965 they also played in Italy, in eight concerts in three cities: Milan, Genoa and Rome. In 1970 the band split up, but each of them carried on making music. John Lennon was killed in New York in 1980, George Harrison died in 2001.