History of England 1-6

‘How Do You Do It?’ would, in George Martin’s words, ‘make the Beatles a household name’. But they were unimpressed – they had grown bored of performing others’ work. They had a song of their own, they said. This was ‘Please Please Me’. When they had finished, George Martin spoke over the tannoy. ‘Congratulations, gentlemen,’ he pronounced, ‘you have just made your first Number One.’ And so it proved. From its opening notes, the song is a cascade of ebullience, with the inimitable harmonies that would soon emerge as the Beatles’ trademark. Written largely by Lennon, it was sung in the ‘mid-Atlantic’ accent used by all British performers at the time. The chords, too, were American-inspired, and yet it was clearly English. The harmonica ‘riff’ which opens this rock song almost precisely replicates that most English of sounds, the peal of church bells.

The oyster had been prised open at last. ‘From Me to You’, ‘She Loves You’, and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ all went to number one. And the sound at their concerts was ‘one of incessant screaming’ from delirious fans. Having seduced the United Kingdom, they conquered the United States, and the phenomenon known as ‘Beatlemania’ was born. It has been said that the British bands of the Sixties were simply offering the Americans American music, stripped of any ugly political associations. But they were also offering the United States a version that was distinctively English, with rhythms, tunes, traditions and frustrations peculiar to England. By now any musician from Liverpool was hunted, then feted. The Mersey Sound was succeeded by Brumbeat, and the Tottenham Sound. There was hope for everyone. The Beatles were followed by the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Troggs, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals – all both singing and composing.

For those of a certain age, the history of this English music is well known. Where once it was surprising it is now familiar, but the music and lyrics seem fresh. That was their contribution, to the Sixties and beyond.

The Stones and the Beatles were friends, uneasily sometimes, but the Kinks were not friends with either. Prickly and intense, they did not make friends easily. Gerry and the Pacemakers had known the Beatles since the beginning. The Who didn’t know anyone. But the point was not friendship so much as fruitful competition.

Where the Beatles were influenced primarily by rock ’n’ roll, the Stones were a blues band, and never strayed very far from those roots. And between the Beatles and the Stones lay a tiny but crucial age gap. Lennon and McCartney had both been ‘Teds’, while Jagger and Richards were part of a new breed peculiar to the Sixties, the ‘Mods’.

The term itself derives from ‘modernist’; unlike the Teds, the Mods saw themselves as the heirs to the American ‘beatniks’. They were, in short, of the middle class. Not that they advertised the fact. Rather, they followed the trend established in the previous decade for aping the manners and mannerisms of the street. They wore their hair long, in imitation of bygone Chelsea artists. The accent, however, was all their own, comprising a nasal drawl – in this respect, Mick Jagger was the exemplar. In the words of one radio journalist, his cadences were imitated ‘by almost every middle-class public schoolboy in the land’.

In respect of violence, however, the Mods stood proudly in the Teddy boy tradition. Sentencing a Mod, George Simpson JP offered a denunciation worthy of Cromwell: ‘These long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums … came to Margate with the avowed intent of interfering with the life and property of its inhabitants.’