Here is a wonderfully evocative newsreel clip, showing a famous early example of pop stars meeting politicians. Who benefited more on this occasion?
The Beatles were not Britain’s first pop stars. Performers such as Tommy Steele, ‘Skiffle’ king Lonnie Donegan and teenager Cliff Richard (Britain’s answer to Elvis Presley) had great domestic success in the early days of rock and roll in the late 1950s.
What made The Beatles so different and so important? They were, in 1964, the first British act to take America – and then the world – by storm. They led the pop-cultural ‘British Invasion’ of the US, which included numerous bands, new, working-class film stars with regional accents such as Michael Caine and Sean Connery, and the fashions of Mary Quant and Carnaby Street. Unlike previous ‘recording artists’, The Beatles composed their own songs and played their own instruments. They made standard the guitar/bass/drums line-up which has dominated pop music ever since. Also, the media and many sections of the public adored their cheeky Scouse wit and their four, distinctive personalities. Therefore, while they were not a ‘manufactured’ act, they were, arguably, the first example of what would later be called a ‘boy band’.
Leader of the Opposition Harold Wilson quotes the music critic of The Times to demonstrate that, three years before they made Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles were also one of the first pop acts to be analyzed as ‘serious’ music (although most record-buyers in 1964 just thought they wrote good pop songs). The soon-to-be Prime Minister recommended to the Queen that ‘our friends The Beatles’ be made MBEs in 1965: the first pop stars to be honoured in such a way.
What you don’t see in this clip, however, is ”Arold’s’ great embarrassment at John Lennon’s joke about ‘purple hearts’. What was Lennon referring to?
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