British beat boom

Rock → British beat boom

For about three years in the early sixties, the sound of the British singles chart was three guitars, a hammered backbeat, and two or three voices stacked on a chorus you could shout back after one listen. A year before, it was orchestras and men in dinner jackets. That new sound was beat music, worked out in Hamburg cellars and Liverpool dance halls before London paid any attention. The British beat boom is the three years that sound spent at the top of the chart and would not come down — a commercial takeover that started in Liverpool and then, wave by wave, threw the national chart open to London and to provincial cities that had never sold a record to the whole country. By the time it broke in 1966, it had rebuilt the British record business around a new kind of act: the self-contained group that wrote and played its own hits, and a new idea of where a hit was allowed to come from.

The chart before the boom

Before the boom, the sound of the chart consisted of a single voice out front — a crooner, or a teenager groomed by a London manager to sound like one — riding a string arrangement and a song some professional had written in a Denmark Street office. The seven-inch single was the whole of pop commerce; the long-player was a sleeve of hits you already owned, sold to people who didn’t buy many records. As a result, by 1962, there were thousands of teenage guitar groups across Britain, built out of the skiffle craze and learning American records by ear in church halls, and the chart had no slot for any of them: a four-piece that wrote its own songs and didn’t answer to any staff writer simply didn’t fit.

The first wave: Merseybeat takes the charts

It started with a harmonica. The Beatles’ “Love Me Do” is a thin, faintly bluesy thing — a harmonica figure and two voices trading the title — and at the end of 1962 it crept to number seventeen, the first record by a Liverpool group to chart nationally.¹ “Please Please Me” came faster and sharper a few months later, reaching number two on the trade chart that became the official one and the top of the papers’ own listings.² The kind of band the business had spent years keeping out was suddenly sitting at the top of it.

A&R men who had spent 1962 showing beat groups the door spent 1963 signing anything with a guitar and a northern vowel. Decca had auditioned the Beatles on New Year’s Day 1962 and turned them down³ — its man Dick Rowe is supposed to have decided guitar groups were on the way out⁴ — and now it couldn’t get to Liverpool fast enough. Brian Epstein’s NEMS handed London’s labels a whole city’s worth of acts and they signed the lot. Gerry and the Pacemakers sent their first three singles straight to number one: “How Do You Do It?”, “I Like It”, and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, a feat no British act had managed and one that would stand for twenty years.⁵ By that autumn the chart read like a bill at the Cavern: the Searchers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Cilla Black, the Swinging Blue Jeans.

The second wave: London R&B rides in

The second wave came up from London a year later, and it was louder and meaner. The Kinks built “You Really Got Me” out of two chords and a dirty, buzzing guitar tone they got by slashing an amp speaker with a razor blade, and went number one in 1964.⁶ The London rhythm and blues clubs had grown up apart from Merseybeat, on Chicago blues and a harder idea of what a guitar was for, and once the press came looking for whatever was next after Liverpool, the scene was already there. The Rolling Stones had opened the door at the end of 1963, scraping to number twelve with “I Wanna Be Your Man” — a Lennon-McCartney song the Beatles simply handed them.⁷ The band that started the boom wrote the second wave its first hit. The Yardbirds stretched blues covers into long howling rave-ups; The Who hammered R&B toward pure feedback in the mod clubs.

The two waves sold opposite pictures of the same teenagers. Liverpool came in matching suits and bowed together at the end of a number; London was styled to look like it wouldn’t. Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Stones, worked the contrast on purpose, down to feeding the press the question of whether you’d let your daughter near one. Two opposite teenagers, one chart, and it had room for both.

The provincial breakthrough

“House of the Rising Sun” opens on a slow climbing guitar figure and a churchy organ, builds across four and a half minutes of minor-key gloom, and ends a long way from where a single was supposed to go. The Animals cut it in a single take in May 1964, and it went to number one in Britain that July and number one in America in September, the first British chart-topper in the States with no Beatle attached.⁸ And it came out of Newcastle, three hundred miles north of the capital.

Before 1963, a British pop career ran through London — the labels, the studios, the managers, and the press all sat inside a few square miles of the capital — and a provincial act either moved there or stayed a local secret. The Animals broke the rule and the rest of the country poured through the gap behind them. Manchester sent up the Hollies; Birmingham sent the Spencer Davis Group and the Moody Blues; the Zombies, schoolfriends from St Albans, took their first single, “She’s Not There”, straight to number two in America.⁹ Cities that had only ever bought records were now making them, and the labels learned to send their scouts north.

The commercial machine

On the first night of 1964 a new program went out from a converted church in Manchester, and its opening half hour ran the Stones, the Dave Clark Five, the Hollies, the Swinging Blue Jeans, and the Beatles at number one.¹⁰ Top of the Pops was a chart countdown set to the week’s actual records, and on that first night it was very nearly the whole boom in one room. Television had found the audience the business now knew how to sell to.

Behind the records, the people who made the hits increasingly didn’t work for the labels. Independent managers and producers built the acts themselves and leased the finished tapes to Decca, Parlophone, and Pye, keeping the control the majors used to hold; Epstein had built the model and Oldham ran the Stones on it, and even George Martin, the one company man in the story, worked as the Beatles’ collaborator more than their boss. Ready Steady Go! had been handing Friday nights over to the music since the previous August,¹¹ and package tours ran a dozen chart acts through provincial cinemas on a single ticket. Under all of it sat the seven-inch single, the cheap object the whole machine existed to move. At the start of 1964 the thing went global: the Beatles broke in America, and the export wave that became British Invasion carried the boom worldwide — that April they held all five of the top places on the American chart at once.¹² What America did with it belongs to the invasion; the boom’s own feat was to have built, in a single year, a machine big enough to make it possible.

Key artists

The Beatles — The band that lit the boom and then outgrew it. Their breakthrough set the chart pattern everyone copied, and when they stepped off the three-minute single for the album after Rubber Soul (1965), the boom lost its center of gravity
Gerry and the Pacemakers — The first wave at its sunniest: three number ones from a standing start in 1963, none of them written by the band. When the chart began to prize groups that made their own material, they had nothing of their own to offer, and it was over almost as fast as it had begun
The Rolling Stones — The second wave’s starting gun. Number twelve in December 1963 looks like nothing on paper, but it told every label that the London blues clubs were a chart proposition, and most of what turned loud and surly over the next three years traces back to that single
The Animals — The provinces’ loudest argument. A Newcastle band carrying a traditional folk lament to number one on both sides of the Atlantic in 1964 proved a worldwide hit no longer needed a London address
The Dave Clark Five — The boom you could franchise. Sold out of Tottenham as the Beatles’ rivals, the Five stamped seventeen American Top 40 hits between 1964 and 1967 onto a heavy, sax-driven stomp that traveled even when the songs didn’t last¹³
The Zombies — The far edge of the boom’s reach. A breathy, minor-key single on a jazz-schooled keyboard, number two in America before the band had even toured; their real masterpiece arrived only in 1968, once the boom was over

Foundational records

The Beatles, “Love Me Do” (1962) — A harmonica over two voices and almost nothing else, scraping to number seventeen: the first Liverpool record to chart nationally
Gerry and the Pacemakers, “How Do You Do It?” (1963) — The song George Martin first pressed on the Beatles, who refused it; handed to Gerry’s group, it went straight to number one and set off the gold rush
The Rolling Stones, “I Wanna Be Your Man” (1963) — Lennon and McCartney finished it in front of the Stones while the band waited; the number-twelve cover opened the second front, the boom’s two camps meeting on a single record
The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun” (1964) — Too slow and too long to be a single, and a number one in Britain and America anyway; the first British chart-topper in the States with no Beatle attached, and proof the chart would now follow a provincial band almost anywhere
The Zombies, “She’s Not There” (1964) — Cool and jazz-touched where the rest of the boom ran hot and bright; a first single from a town with no scene at all that reached the American top two
The Spencer Davis Group, “Keep On Running” (1965) — Birmingham at number one in January 1966, the provinces still arriving just as the singles boom began to ebb¹⁴
The Beatles, Rubber Soul (1965) — The flagship stepping off the single and onto the album: the first sign that the chart the boom had conquered was about to be downgraded

Dissolution

By 1966 the boom’s sound was starting to date. The three-minute single still sold, but the records that mattered most were getting longer and stranger and moving onto the album, where beat, a singles form to its bones, could not follow. The market was splitting into two rooms: a singles crowd still filed under “pop,” and an “underground” that bought LPs and treated them as art. Most beat groups couldn’t cross the gap. A handful made it by becoming something else entirely — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who — and the rest, built for a chart that no longer wanted them, drifted into cabaret and the nostalgia circuit or out of music for good. When the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s on 26 May 1967, the form the boom had ridden was already a period piece.¹⁵

The split outlived the boom and hardened into a hierarchy. Singles pop was filed as disposable and album rock as serious, and the boom’s own achievement — a group writing and selling its own hits — became the standard the next decade’s music would be judged against. That value system is the one Authenticity and its discontents and The pop factory work through.

MAP

Explorer

British beat boom

The chart before the boom

The first wave: Merseybeat takes the charts

The second wave: London R&B rides in

The provincial breakthrough

The commercial machine

Key artists

Foundational records

Dissolution

Further reading

See also

MAP

Explorer

British beat boom

The chart before the boom

The first wave: Merseybeat takes the charts

The second wave: London R&B rides in

The provincial breakthrough

The commercial machine

Key artists

Foundational records

Dissolution

Further reading

See also

Footnotes