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The New Madness started in Liverpool, where Lennon and McCartney had been playing together since 1957. “We were from the North of England, which was nowhere to a lot of people,” McCartney said. The dark and gritty, war-wearied, working-class North had lately become the subject of a certain fascination. “Coronation Street,” a kitchen-sink soap opera set in Manchester, had débuted, in 1960. But the Beatles became the embodiment of the North, the sound of it. It wasn’t just their music or their accents; it was their wit, which was a little Flanders and Swann, a little “Goon Show,” and a lot Liverpool.
By 1963, the New York Times was reporting on a development in the U.K. that had been dubbed “Beatlemania”: writhing crowds of young people screaming, shrieking, bursting, blooming, and wilting, like fields of flowers. “By comparison, Elvis Presley is an Edwardian tenor of considerable diffidence,” the reporter Frederick Lewis wrote. The Beatles could claim to be “spokesmen for the new, noisy, anti-Establishment generation.”
The members were born in the hard, rationed, and air-raid-sheltered years of the war: Lennon and Ringo Starr in 1940, McCartney in 1942, George Harrison in 1943. Early on, as the Quarry Men, some of them wore bootlace ties and greased their hair, like other swaggering British boys who called themselves Teddy Boys or, later, Mods and Rockers. In 1960, they shed that look when they left Liverpool for Hamburg, another port city, where they hung out with students and artists and writers from all over the world, everyone groping for the latest ideas, the newest thing, the moment. Even in dingy basement pubs, they played for what was, essentially, an international audience. “It was handy them being foreign,” Lennon said. “We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it.” They played till they dropped, and when they dropped they soaked it all up: art-student chic, beret-wearing existentialism, red-light-district bawdyism, German-pub rowdyism. “I grew up in Hamburg,” Lennon said. “We were forced grown, like rhubarb,” Harrison added. They were cultivated in the soil of a postwar, transnational youth movement, aching, yearning, and angry.
The Beatles first appeared on the radio in 1962, on a BBC show called “Teenagers Turn—Here We Go.” Teen-agers could seem tamer in Britain than in America, less anguished, less adversarial. (“America had teenagers but everywhere else just had people,” Lennon pointed out.) British teens were far more likely to work after high school; among the Beatles, only Lennon had gone to college, at the Liverpool College of Art. Unlike previous generations, they weren’t obligated to military service: conscription had ended in 1960. When a reporter asked, “If there had been National Service in England, would the Beatles have existed?” Starr answered no.
Freed from the duty of fighting for the Empire, they fought against the establishment, and on behalf of a sexual awakening. In 1960, Penguin had published the long-banned D. H. Lawrence novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” after a U.S. court declared that the book wasn’t obscene. The pill was sold in the U.K. starting in 1961; two years later, the Beatles released the single “Please Please Me,” along with the eponymous album. Philip Larkin celebrated the occasion in his poem “Annus Mirabilis”:
By June, the band had their own radio show, “Pop Go the Beatles.” They were iconic, inescapable, unable to escape. “We don’t have a private life anymore,” Harrison complained. You can see the walls closing in on them in McCartney’s photographs. Rooftops, car windows, hotel rooms. But not everything was closing. In London, McCartney told me, “the world opened up,” especially at the Establishment, an anti-establishment comedy club opened, in 1961, by the satirist Peter Cook. The club was in Soho, and lifetime members were reportedly presented with a portrait of Harold Macmillan, the Conservative Prime Minister. Macmillan, then sixty-seven, with a walrus mustache, was the last Prime Minister born during the reign of Queen Victoria, his term the end of an era. “All my policies at home and abroad are in ruins,” he wrote in his diary, in January, 1963. Months later, his administration was tarnished by a scandal involving his war secretary, John Profumo, who had been having an affair with Christine Keeler, a showgirl who was also sleeping with a Soviet naval attaché. After Profumo stepped down, a rocker named Screaming Lord Sutch, twenty-two, ran for his seat in Parliament, as a candidate of the National Teenage Party. Macmillan eventually resigned. The Daily Mirror’s front page shrieked, “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THIS COUNTRY?”
The photographer Harry Benson, who sometimes travelled with the band.
Whatever was going on was going on all over the place. On December 10, 1963, Walter Cronkite decided to finally broadcast Alexander Kendrick’s report from Beatleland.
The Beatles had released three singles in the United States; none had broken out. But, on December 26th, their fourth, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” blasted off like an Apollo rocket. Bob Dylan heard the song on the radio while driving in California. “Fuck!” he said. “Man, that was fuckin’ great. Oh, man—fuck!”
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