The Beatles
Over eight years of recording, from 1962 to 1970, four young men from Liverpool redefined what popular music could do.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Members and associates ⏳🌊
- MemberJohn Lennon
The one who first started the band, on rhythm guitar and vocals, he poured a sharp wit and the losses of his childhood into his songs.
- MemberPaul McCartney
On bass, vocals and piano, he steered the later Beatles with his melodic instinct and his vision in the studio.
- MemberGeorge Harrison
He played lead guitar and brought the sitar into rock, and in the later years came into his own as a songwriter with songs like “Something.”
- MemberRingo Starr
The drummer who joined in 1962, whose restrained, song-serving playing and easygoing humor kept the four in balance.
- ProducerGeorge Martin
Took them on at Parlophone and, through classical arranging and recording craft, turned their imaginings into sound.
- InfluenceBob Dylan
After their 1964 meeting in New York, Dylan's confessional lyrics turned Lennon's songwriting inward.
I. The boys from Liverpool · 1940–1960
(Formation) The band formed in 1960 in Liverpool, England. The name the Beatles settled into place that summer, but the roots lay a few years earlier in the Quarrymen, a skiffle group John Lennon had put together with neighborhood friends. Liverpool was a working-class port still scarred by wartime bombing, and also a gateway through which sailors crossing the Atlantic brought in American records. (John) John Lennon was born in Liverpool in October 1940. Lennon's father, Alfred, was away at sea, and Lennon grew up apart from mother Julia as well, in the home of Aunt Mimi. Julia was the one who taught her son banjo chords, but she was killed in a traffic accident in July 1958. Lennon would later pour this loss into a number of songs. (Paul) Paul McCartney was born in June 1942. McCartney's father, Jim, was a cotton salesman who had led a jazz band in his youth, and McCartney's mother, Mary, a midwife, died of cancer in 1956. In July 1957, at a church fete in Woolton, the fifteen-year-old McCartney saw the Quarrymen, and when McCartney tuned a guitar and played “Twenty Flight Rock” for them, Lennon brought McCartney into the band. Both later recalled that the shared loss of a mother was what bound them together. (George) George Harrison was born in February 1943, the son of a bus driver. A younger schoolmate of McCartney's, Harrison joined in early 1958 after playing the guitar piece “Raunchy” on the top deck of a bus. Lennon's art-school friend Stuart Sutcliffe came in after buying a bass with the money from selling a painting, and in August 1960, just before the trip to Hamburg, drummer Pete Best joined.
II. Hamburg nights · 1960–1962
(Hamburg) In August 1960 the five crossed to St. Pauli, the nightlife district of Hamburg in West Germany (today's Germany). The club owner had them play for hours every night, and they slept in a storeroom-like space behind a cinema. Those nights of stretching songs out and throwing their bodies around to hold the crowd built their stage stamina and their repertoire. The first stay ended when the seventeen-year-old Harrison was deported as a minor. (Astrid) In Hamburg they met the photographer Astrid Kirchherr and Kirchherr's circle of friends. The black-and-white photographs Kirchherr took, and the combed-forward fringe that circle wore, would later become the face of the Beatles. Sutcliffe became engaged to Kirchherr and in 1961 left the band to return to painting, and McCartney took over the bass. In April 1962 Sutcliffe died of a brain hemorrhage at twenty-one. Lennon had lost the dearest of friends. (Cavern) Back in Liverpool, from 1961 the band played lunchtime and evening sets again and again at the Cavern, a basement club. That November Brian Epstein, who ran a record shop, came to see them, and the following January became their manager. Epstein had them trade leather jackets for suits and polished their stage patter and running order. They failed their Decca audition; the story goes that the man in charge said guitar groups were on their way out. (Ringo) In June 1962 George Martin, producer at EMI's Parlophone label, gave them a trial. In August the band let Best go and brought in Ringo Starr, the drummer of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Accounts of why the change was made differ to this day. Born in July 1940 in the Dingle, Liverpool, Starr recalled spending long stretches of childhood in hospital, and with an easygoing humor soon became the counterweight that kept the four in balance. That same month Lennon married Cynthia Powell.
A song sung so many times in Hamburg and at the Cavern that it lived in their bodies. A voice hardened on the night stages was captured just as it was in the final moments of the first album.
- It was the last song of a single day of recording on February 11, 1963. Knowing that Lennon, throat ravaged by a cold, could manage it only once, Martin placed it at the very end, and the first take went on the record as it was — listen to the texture of that cracked, hoarse voice.
- The song is a simple frame that repeats just three chords. Over it, the relentless drive of McCartney's bass and the drums of Starr, Best's successor, carries the song forward.
- Just before the last verse comes the passage where the three stack an 'ah' ever higher, one voice at a time. The moment the chord is complete, Lennon's shout bursts out.
- Early stereo pressings split the instruments and voices left and right. Listen to one headphone at a time and you hear a performance recorded essentially live.
- This was the song they played right after Lennon's jewelry joke at the Royal Variety Performance in November 1963.
III. Beatlemania · 1962–1964
(Debut) In October 1962 the first single, “Love Me Do,” reached No. 17 on the British charts. The second single, “Please Please Me,” was sped up and polished at Martin's urging, and in early 1963 it topped several charts. The debut album of the same name was recorded in a single day, February 11, 1963. The joint songwriting credit Lennon–McCartney was a pact the two had made early on, and in the early days they often really did sit face to face and write together. (Frenzy) After a television appearance from the London Palladium in the autumn of 1963, the newspapers began using the word Beatlemania. At the Royal Variety Performance that November, Lennon joked that the audience in the expensive seats could rattle their jewelry instead of clapping. A wit that made no effort to hide working-class accents was as new as the music. That year Lennon and McCartney handed the Rolling Stones “I Wanna Be Your Man,” which gave the Stones their first Top 20 hit. (America) In February 1964 “I Want to Hold Your Hand” went to No. 1 on the American charts, and their appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on the 9th was counted at some 73 million viewers. In the first week of April, positions 1 through 5 on the Billboard singles chart were all Beatles songs. Young men who had grown up singing along to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Motown records were, in effect, selling that music back to America. (Film) That same year Richard Lester's film “A Hard Day's Night” was released. The chiming sound of the Rickenbacker 12-string guitar Harrison played also left its mark on the sound of the American band the Byrds. Still, the American merchandising deal Epstein signed, in which the band's share came to just 10 percent, is counted as a classic mistake by an inexperienced manager.
The song that opened the door to the American market. Written together at the piano by Lennon and McCartney sitting face to face, it is the model of their early co-writing.
- The first song the Beatles recorded on a 4-track machine. Handclaps overdubbed separately on top of the basic track brace the beat firmly.
- The opening guitar seems to slip in off the beat, so on first hearing it is hard to tell where the downbeat falls. As that brief tension resolves, the song begins.
- Follow the harmony of Lennon's and McCartney's two voices running side by side on different notes. The moments when they cry out together up high create the song's giddy mood.
- In the contrasting middle section (the bridge), things suddenly go quiet and Harrison's guitar lays down a soft bed. The surge that follows at its end is the contrast this song is built on.
- It was the closing song of their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964, and earlier, on January 29, they had also recorded a German-language version in Paris for the German market.
IV. From the stage to the studio · 1965–1966
(Fatigue) In 1965 the Beatles shot the film “Help!” and in August stood before more than 55,000 people at Shea Stadium in New York. The members said many times that the screaming was so loud they couldn't hear their own playing. When their appointment as Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) was announced in June, some veterans returned their own medals in protest. Lennon later confessed that “Help!” really was a song asking for help. (Dylan) Bob Dylan, whom they met in New York in 1964, turned Lennon's songwriting inward. In “You've Got to Hide Your Love Away,” Lennon tried out the confessional tone Lennon would call the Dylan period. McCartney sang “Yesterday” alone over a string quartet, and on Rubber Soul that December, Harrison brought the Indian sitar into “Norwegian Wood.” Songs that had kept to romance and dancing widened to take in memory, anxiety and the subtleties of relationships. (Experiments) On the 1966 album Revolver, Martin and the young engineer Geoff Emerick put microphones right up against the instruments, ran tape backward and fed voices through a rotating speaker. Lennon and Harrison experienced LSD around this time, and Harrison, absorbed in Indian philosophy and the music of Ravi Shankar, began formal study of the sitar. Harrison's “Taxman” was an open complaint about the punishing rates Britain then levied on high earners. (The end) That year touring turned dangerous. When a passage from a March interview with a London newspaper, in which Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, spread across America in August, some Southern radio stations staged record burnings. In July they left the Philippines amid a hostile atmosphere for having failed to appear at a reception hosted by the president's wife. After the August 29 concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, they never again played a paid concert.
An album into which the fatigue of touring and new experiences flowed as studio experiment. For the first time they set out in earnest to make sounds that could not be reproduced on stage.
- The final track, featured in the video, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” hovers almost entirely over a single chord. Above Starr's distinctive repeating drum pattern, loops of tape McCartney made at home and played over and over (tape loops) swoop back and forth like the cries of seagulls.
- In the latter part of the same song, Lennon's voice is fed through a rotating speaker meant for the Hammond organ (a Leslie speaker), so it wavers as if echoing from far away. Lennon is said to have wanted to sound like a monk on a mountaintop.
- No Beatle plays an instrument on “Eleanor Rigby.” Emerick recorded an 8-piece string ensemble with the microphones pressed close to the instruments, drawing out a raw, sharp-edged string sound.
- The guitar solo on “I'm Only Sleeping” was played by Harrison with the knowledge that it would run backward. Listen for the texture of a sound that begins as if being sucked inward.
- For this album EMI engineer Ken Townsend built a device that automatically doubled the voice (double tracking). That is why Lennon's voice sounds unusually thick on so many songs.
V. The year of Sgt. Pepper · 1967–1968
(Childhood) After nearly four months of recording following the end of touring, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” came out in February 1967 as the two sides of a single. Both songs called up childhood places in Liverpool. If Lennon's song is a hazy memory of the garden of a Salvation Army children's home near Lennon's aunt's house, McCartney's painted the scenery around a bus stop in bright colors. (Pepper) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in June 1967. The frame of a fictional band giving a performance was McCartney's idea, and the sound was laid on coat upon coat by combining the tracks of the 4-track machine and freeing them up again (overdubbing). Three days after the release, Jimi Hendrix opened a London concert with the title song as McCartney and Harrison watched from the audience. Around the same time, in another room at EMI's studios, Pink Floyd was recording its first album. (Loss) On August 27, while the members were in Bangor, Wales, hearing a lecture by the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Brian Epstein died of a drug overdose at home in London. The inquest ruled it an accidental death. Lennon later recalled thinking then that it was all over. The television film “Magical Mystery Tour,” made without a manager, was savaged by critics at the end of that year. (Rupture) In early 1968, on retreat in Rishikesh, India, they wrote dozens of songs. Back home they founded the company Apple, but its management soon fell into disarray. Lennon was living with Yoko Ono and brought Ono into the studio. During the recording of the double album The Beatles (known as the White Album), Starr, feeling left out on the margins, quit the band for close to 2 weeks before returning, and Emerick, unable to bear the tense atmosphere, walked away. Meanwhile “Hey Jude,” which McCartney wrote thinking of Lennon's son Julian, whose parents were heading for divorce, came out as Apple's first single.
A song in which Lennon's childhood landscape, a boyhood spent apart from a mother, meets the unlimited studio time a band that had stopped touring now held in its hands.
- The flutelike sound at the opening is McCartney playing a keyboard instrument that plays back recorded tape (the Mellotron).
- Lennon asked for the gentle band version and the heavy version with brass and cellos to be joined into one. The two differed in pitch and tempo, so Martin and Emerick matched them by adjusting the tape speed — listen for the seam at about the one-minute mark, where the sound suddenly turns heavy and murky.
- Starr's drums were recorded with a dull, pressed-down sound, and reversed cymbals come sucking in here and there.
- The ending, in which the sound fades as if the song were over and then returns, was a rare break with convention for a single at the time. In the returning section, Harrison's swarmandal, an Indian string instrument, swirls together with warped sounds.
McCartney is said to have written it with young Julian in mind, as his parents' divorce loomed. Released in a year of growing tension within the band, it is a song that speaks in the language of consolation.
- It was recorded on the eight-track machine at Trident Studios in London. Follow the build: it opens with only McCartney's piano and voice, and with each verse guitar, tambourine and drums are added one by one.
- At 7 minutes 11 seconds, it was unusually long for a radio single of the day. The last four minutes or so are a long ending (coda) that repeats meaningless syllables.
- A 36-piece orchestra joins that coda, its members also clapping and singing along. Over the swelling layers of sound, McCartney lays improvised high-pitched cries.
- McCartney recalled that he had jotted down one line of the lyric as a placeholder and wanted to change it, but Lennon told him to leave it. He has said that whenever he reaches that line in concert, he thinks of Lennon.
VI. The last recordings · 1969–1970
(Get Back) In January 1969 McCartney proposed going back to basics and recording as if live. Amid the cold, early-morning schedule at Twickenham Film Studios in London, Harrison walked out on January 10, saying he was quitting, and came back a few days later on conditions that included moving the filming location. When the organist Billy Preston joined, the mood eased, and on January 30 they gave their last public performance on the roof of the Apple building. (Money) Apple's finances were sinking. Lennon, Harrison and Starr wanted Allen Klein, who had handled the Rolling Stones' business, as manager; McCartney wanted the family lawyers of Linda Eastman, whom he married in March. Around the same time Northern Songs, which managed the copyrights of the Lennon–McCartney songs, passed to ATV. Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar in March, and by then his songs increasingly turned toward the couple's life and the peace movement. (Abbey Road) Even so, that summer the four asked Martin to make a record the way they used to, and recorded Abbey Road. Side two was filled with a medley of short songs strung together without a break. Harrison's “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” showed that he had become a songwriter to rival Lennon–McCartney. August 20 is recorded as the last day all four were in the studio together. In September Lennon told the others he was leaving, but for business reasons it was not made public. (Breakup) In April 1970, in a question-and-answer press release accompanying his first solo album, McCartney said he had no plans to work with the Beatles again, and the papers took it as an announcement of the breakup. In May came Let It Be, Phil Spector's assembly of the January recordings; McCartney objected to the strings and choir overdubbed onto “The Long and Winding Road.” On December 31 McCartney filed suit in the High Court in London to dissolve the partnership, and in March 1971 the court appointed a receiver.
The last album the four recorded together, in the thick of their business disputes. It is a finale in which you can almost hear the resolve to leave behind music rather than quarrels.
- In “Come Together,” the first track chosen for the video, the groove comes from McCartney's sliding bass riff and Starr's low drum (tom-tom) pounding. Between every bar, Lennon's whispers and handclaps pass like echoes.
- Harrison brought in a newly released electronic keyboard instrument, the Moog synthesizer. You can hear its smooth, unfamiliar timbre midway through “Here Comes the Sun” and in “Because.”
- Side two is a medley of about 16 minutes, stitching unfinished song fragments together without a break. Listen to how the mood shifts at the seams between songs.
- “The End” contains Starr's only drum solo of the Beatles years, after which McCartney, Harrison and Lennon trade guitar solos two bars apiece, going around three times.
- Then comes a silence, and the 23-second “Her Majesty” is tacked on as a hidden track.
VII. After the four · 1970–2025
(Solo) The four went their separate ways. Harrison's three-record All Things Must Pass released at a stroke the songs he had stockpiled during the Beatles years, and Starr joined him at the concert for Bangladesh relief he organized in 1971. Lennon moved to New York and wrote political songs; in November 1974 he went onstage at Elton John's Madison Square Garden concert and sang with him, which proved to be his last major appearance. McCartney formed Wings with Linda. The partnership was settled on paper at the end of 1974. (Loss) On December 8, 1980, Lennon was shot and killed outside his home in New York. He was forty. In the mid-1990s the three surviving members, working on the “Anthology” project, added playing to cassette demos Lennon had left behind and released “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” Harrison died of cancer in November 2001. (Restoration) In November 2023 came “Now and Then,” billed as the last Beatles song. Machine-learning technology developed for Peter Jackson's documentary “Get Back” separated the piano and voice from Lennon's worn demo, and McCartney and Starr completed the song together with guitar Harrison had recorded in 1995. The song won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance in 2025. (Legacy) The studio albums they released in Britain numbered twelve. In that short time the Beatles made the band that writes its own songs, recording that uses the studio as an instrument, and the habit of hearing an album as a single work into the defaults of popular music. The stamina of Hamburg's nightclub stages and the losses of the Liverpool boys lay beneath all of those experiments.
Lesser-known stories
Ringo Starr first recorded with Lennon, McCartney and Harrison not in 1962 but in October 1960, in Hamburg. When Lu Walters, singer with the Hurricanes, cut a record in a small recording booth, the three and Starr backed him. Most of the discs made then have vanished, and the episode remained a footnote in biographies until the session records of researchers like Mark Lewisohn were compiled. Decca's missing out on the Beatles is famous, but it is less well known that it was Harrison who steered that same Decca's Dick Rowe to the Rolling Stones. In May 1963, on the judging panel of a music contest in Liverpool, Harrison advised him to go and see the Stones in London, and Decca soon signed them. The tale of the label that turned down the Beatles is so famous that this connection has often been buried. After leaving the band, Sutcliffe studied at the Hamburg art college under the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, who rated him one of his finest students. Though overshadowed by the nickname the fifth Beatle, he was someone who chose for himself to become a painter. Abbey Road Studios, now a place of pilgrimage, was originally named EMI Studios. Only in 1970, after the great success of the album Abbey Road, was it officially renamed after the street.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Skiffle
(In rock) A homespun music hugely popular among British teenagers in the 1950s, playing American folk and blues on acoustic guitars and instruments made from household items. A washboard scraped with fingernails kept the beat, and a tea chest fitted with a broom handle and a string supplied the bass. Since anyone could form a band without expensive instruments, countless school bands, like Lennon's Quarrymen, got their start here. Think of drumming on pencil cases and desks in the classroom to keep time with friends while singing — that, too, is a little skiffle band.
Sitar
(Meaning) The name comes from the Persian setar: se means three, and tar means string. Today's sitar, however, has nearly twenty strings. (In rock) A long-necked string instrument of Indian classical music. Beneath the plucked strings lies a separate set that ring on their own in sympathy (sympathetic strings), so a single note spreads into a long, shimmering resonance. Harrison first brought it onto a rock record in “Norwegian Wood,” and later studied formally with Ravi Shankar. Hold down a piano's right pedal and shout loudly into it, and the strings hum back in response — sympathetic strings work on exactly that principle.
Tape loop
(In rock) A length of recording tape spliced end to end into a ring, so that when played the same sound repeats endlessly. On “Tomorrow Never Knows,” several loops McCartney made were run simultaneously on several tape machines and mixed by raising and lowering their volumes, creating an unfamiliar soundscape. It is much like video-game background music that keeps repeating the same section. (Elsewhere) In computer programming, a loop is a statement that makes the same instructions repeat a set number of times.
Overdubbing
(Meaning) A word combining the English over (on top) and dub (to add sound), meaning to lay new sound over sound already recorded. (In rock) A method of first recording a basic performance, then later recording vocals or other instruments one layer at a time and stacking them. Because the Beatles worked on machines with only four tracks, they completed Sgt. Pepper by combining the filled tracks into one to free up space and then stacking again. It is like painting, adding coat after coat of paint over a sketch. (Elsewhere) Dubbing can also refer to replacing the voices in a foreign film or cartoon with those of Korean voice actors.
Double tracking
(In rock) When the same song is sung twice and the takes layered, the two drift ever so slightly apart and the voice sounds thicker and stronger. This is called double tracking. Because Lennon disliked singing the same song again, in 1966 EMI engineer Ken Townsend devised automatic double tracking (ADT), using two tape machines to copy the original voice a fraction later and layer it. It is the same principle by which two friends singing the same note in choir class sound fuller than one alone — a thickness born of the fact that their timing is never perfectly identical.
Mellotron
(In rock) A keyboard instrument of the 1960s in which each key has a strip of tape bearing a recording of a real instrument, played back when the key is pressed. It could produce flute or string sounds without players, but the tape for each key lasts little more than 8 seconds, after which the sound cuts off. The flute-like sound at the opening of “Strawberry Fields Forever” is this. Think of a toy sound pad that plays prerecorded sounds at the push of a button — the Mellotron is a kind of grandfather of today's sampler.
Medley
(Meaning) From the Old French medlee, meaning a mixture or a confused fight, it refers to many things mixed together. (In rock) A form in which several songs are played without pause as one continuous piece. Side two of Abbey Road strings together short songs the band never finished, without a break, into a single flow of about 16 minutes. The part of a school recital where several children's songs are sung one after another without stopping is exactly a medley. (Elsewhere) In swimming, the event in which one swimmer or one team swims four strokes in turn is called the medley.