The Beatles: How Beatlemania was created
There have been other truly great bands, other pioneering artists and movements, other beloved cultural zeniths, but since a particularly lazy cave-dweller excused themselves from the hunt to scribble on a wall and this thing we call art began, nothing has come remotely close to The Beatles. That sort of transcendent sensation doesn’t just happen because you’re a great band or even the best band, for that matter. Excuse me, but what even is a superlative like ‘the best’ in something as subjective as art? No, the buzz of Beatlemania was a viral frenzy that put ‘The Fab Four’ on a pedestal, and we’re still subsumed by its joyous buzz to this day.
Recently, we’ve been putting the question of whether The Beatles are overrated to various bands in quick-fire interviews. Not one of them has fallen foul of the pitfall of agreeing. This is because, within the arts, their contribution is recognised beyond the music. You don’t even have to be a fan of them in any way to accept that they drove the bus of pop culture as the wheels were being bolted on. This is the tale of how they came to be the Marco Senna of moving music culture forward.
“I lived under a billboard that said, ‘The Beatles is coming’,” Beach Boys lynchpin Van Dyke Parks recalled, “And I got the sense that it was a plague, and that it was going to have cultural implication throughout the world.” This impending invasion was the brainchild of Derek Taylor, the press officer for The Beatles.
Taylor initially came across The Beatles when he was assigned to write a review on them in May 1963. His editors at the Daily Express were pushing the prevalent angle of slating them as a vapid teen fad. This is a slander that he couldn’t bring himself to partake in. Enamoured by the group’s buoyant performance, he was one of the few journalists who sang their praises, and, with that, he earned their trust. While much of the criticism had come from afar, by being at the show, he recognised the vitality of the experience. These screaming girls and the onrush of liberation was not going to go away because of stuffy print by the bourgeoisie. It seemed to connect with the zeitgeist, and it was surely only going to gain more traction.
As predicted, the band started to gain some national attention. At this point, a plan was devised. He would collaborate on a column with George Harrison. This was, in essence, a proto-blog post from a band member. The times were a-changing, and people wanted to know more about the artists they adored. This recurring column opened the door not just to The Beatles the band, but to the four cheeky lads from Liverpool set to make waves. The cult of ‘personality’ was born.
Years of progression had turned music from something consigned to concert halls or folks with dogeared guitars in pubs into big business. There was money to be made, and with the increasing commerciality of music, bands needed a sort of sales pitch to run alongside what you heard on the radio. Beatlemania turned the band into a proto-viral trend. You were either part of the phenomenon or on the outside of it. You’d seen nothing of the sort since Elvis Presley, thus, why on earth would you not want to be part of it?
For the first time, youth culture had its own space. This was truly something new for the kids. Local businessman Brian Epstein recognised this when he became their manager in 1962. And he was delighted with Taylor’s promotion. Alongside every other business profiting off the craze, and therefore promoting it, the band became bigger than their music. They were a cultural explosion, and merely being a fan of them was now a hobby to partake in.
Then you have the rather more mystic side of things that pertains to psychological hysteria. A swathe of FOMO (fear of missing out) was built-up around their iconic performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The plague had arrived. It was about the have a huge cultural impact whether you liked it or not so you may as well witness it. So, it came to pass that one Sunday night, 73 million Americans crowded around 60% of the country’s television sets to watch ‘The Fab Four’. With more than half of an empire’s cultural outlets transfixed, Beatlemania was bound to spread even further. The rest, as they say, is ancient history.
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