The four months and five songs in 1964 that made The Beatles the biggest band in the world
Recently, Paul McCartney finally admitted that he’s willing to call The Beatles the biggest band in history.
Obviously, the great songwriter isn’t revealing anything we didn’t already know. For over half a century now, the standards of music success have always been viewed through the lens of the Fab Four, who set every possible record imaginable. But for the man who existed firmly in the eye of the storm, it was hard to believe whether any of it was true, such was the fever-dream feeling of the experiences.
Only now, 60 years later, has McCartney admitted what we have all known for years. There was nothing bigger than The Beatles, and there’s a big chance nothing ever will be, for the Fab Four were the exact band that the 1960s asked for. Somewhere in between pop commercialism and psychedelic experimentation, they took traditional values into the future and did it all while storming the charts.
That happened right from the very outset. Their 1964 debut album Please Please Me lit a spark in popular culture after rumours of their live shows had made it across the pond and made them one of the most anticipated bands in the world.
McCartney remembered, “By the end of February ‘64, after our visit to America and three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, we finally had to admit that we would not, as we had originally feared, just fizzle out as many groups do. We were in the vanguard of something more momentous, a revolution in the culture.”
It wasn’t just the emphatic appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and the dynamic American press tour that followed; it was the genuine chart success that came off the back of it. In that year, the band absolutely dominated the charts and spent four months at number one with five songs from that debut record.
That year, The Beatles topped the Cashbox Magazine record chart for 16 straight weeks with four different songs. From January 25th until May 16th, the likely lads from Liverpool announced themselves on the world stage, with ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ (eight weeks at number one), ‘She Loves You’ (two weeks), ‘Twist And Shout’ (one week) and ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ (five weeks). They only had one week off the top spot when Louie Armstrong’s ‘Hello Dolly’ came into the mix, but then they bounced right back with ‘Love Me Do’ putting them back on top for another week.
From there on out, it was impossible to believe anything other than full throttle stardom for the band. While McCartney wouldn’t admit they were the biggest band in history for 60 years, he did know then that nothing would be the same as it was before.
That chart domination sparked a heady era of Beatlemania that would see the band stay there until the end of the decade. But more than that, it taught them that commercial success of that magnitude simply isn’t sustainable and thus forced them to make the most important decision of their career: retire to the studio and make some of the best albums ever created.
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