The Beatles were a British musical group, founded in Liverpool in 1960 and active until 1970. The group was composed of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
Without any doubt they are one of the few groups that marked an era in music, costume, fashion and pop art. Just to give you an idea of the impact and success that they had on society, I can tell you that they sold around one billion album copies (till these days).
The story at beginning of this group is I would say really casual, in fact all started in a small church in Liverpool. Like every year the church had this celebration, and on July 6th 1957 showed up a new band formed by very young people, its leader was the sixteen years old John Lennon.
They didn’t obtain immediately success, they had to wait a few years. This difficulty gaining success was also caused by the lack of a permanent drummer. This problem was finally fixed when Tommy Moore entered the band.
A real transformation began in the German city of Hamburg, they were forced by the demanding owner of Indra, the venue where they performed (at number 64 Große Freiheit, a side street of the “Reeperbahn”, the red light street in the St. Pauli district) to do long performances in where they had to reproduce their music at maximum volume (maybe they didn’t like it but this for sure helped to distinguish themselves). In that period, the style and repertoire that would characterize the first years of their activity were formed and according to a theory subsequently contradicted by the interested party Paul’s desire to take Stuart’s place at the helm began to emerge Bass. The first time the group performed under the name “The Beatles” was a success. This happened on the 17th August 1960.
In 1962 they decided to go back to Liverpool and there they began playing in a venue in Mathew Street, the Cavern Club where, and thanks to their determination and ease on stage, they attracted a large audience.
1963 was the year in which the group’s popularity exploded. Their musical productions, concerts on special occasions, we have to remember the performance at “Val Parnell’s Sunday Night” at the London Palladium and the historic performance at the “Royal Variety Performance”, in the presence of English royalty, and television appearances contributed to this. Evidence of the boom in celebrity is, among other things, the trend in membership of the Beatles fan club; at the beginning of 1963 the members numbered one thousand, by the end of the same year the number of members had risen to eighty thousand. At the end of that year the English newspapers almost unanimously recognized the group’s qualities.
The artistic maturity of the Liverpool group is considered by many critics to be the two-year period 1966-1967. In 1966,the album “Revolver” was released, which many experts believe was a peak in the Beatles’ creativity.
After this peak the Beatles started to become too “old fashioned” and they were substituted by famous groups that got formed during these years. But lot of people considered the real end of the Beatles after the assassination of John Lennon on 8th December 1980.
Anyway this remains for sure one of the most important and impactful groups ever existed.
Sources
https://www.britannica.com/topic/the-Beatles
