In which year did The Beatles get the most number ones?
No matter what year of The Beatles’ career you’re looking at, one thing is constant: they were churning out great hits.
It’s always very tiring when you talk to someone who says they don’t like The Beatles. Look, music is subjective, and so love or hate someone, you’re both right and wrong. As a music writer, I have to be open-minded with this kind of thing, but it continues to baffle me when someone says they don’t like The Beatles, not just because of how good they were, but because of how varied their style of music is.
When you compare their first album to their last and all things in between, the band were never ones for remaining stagnant in the face of creativity. Their style of music and the kind of topics they wrote about drifted wildly, to the point that regardless of what kind of music you’re into, The Beatles have an era that will appeal to you on some level.
What was impressive about the band was the fact that even though their sound was constantly changing, they were also able to forever appeal to the masses. Whether they were making something pop -nfused, rock-heavy or psychedelic, people everywhere continued buying it, and The Beatles never stopped getting number one singles as a result.
The band weren’t actually together as commercial successes for many years, but when they were in the charts, they had plenty of big hitters. It begs the question, in what year did the Beatles have their most number one hits?
So, which year had the most Beatles number ones?
Every year that the Beatles were making music, they were changing the industry in some way, shape or form. However, there was no bigger 12 months for the band than those when they first rose to prominence in the US in 1964. The rise of Beatlemania is well and truly something to be studied, as the Fab Four crossed the pond and absolutely took the world by storm in the process.
“There was no real future for a British band before The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964,” said Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, “That was the turning point, after which there was an avalanche. It totally transformed the possibilities, and as usual, The Beatles were the frontrunners. In music, there is The Beatles, and then there is everybody else.”
Everybody was obsessed with The Beatles. All of a sudden, people’s dreams of becoming successful solo artists didn’t seem as important, as they called their friends and cleared out their garages in order to put together some last-minute jams in the hope of becoming the next big band. The hype of the Beatles resulted in a total of six number one hits, each of which was better than the last.
The band’s songs, which all went to number one in 1964, included ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘Love Me Do’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, and ‘I Feel Fine’, and while most bands would have peaked after releasing so many great tracks in one year, The Beatles went on to keep making incredible music that pushed the boundaries of different genres.
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