British Invasion

For other uses, see British Invasion (disambiguation).

The arrival of The Beatles in the U.S., and subsequent appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, marked the start of the British Invasion.

British Invasion was the group of rock and pop performers from the United Kingdom who became popular in the United States during the mid-1960s.

Background

The rebellious tone and image of American rock and roll and blues musicians became popular with British youth in the late 1950s. While early commercial attempts to replicate American rock and roll mostly failed, the trad jazz-inspired skiffle craze, with its "do it yourself" attitude, was the starting point of several British acts that would later be part of the "invasion". Lonnie Donegan, who is credited with singlehandedly popularizing skiffle in Britain, had two top 20 US pre-Invasion hits. Young British groups started to combine various British and American styles, coalescing in Liverpool during 1962 in what became known as Merseybeat, hence the "beat boom". That same year the James Bond film series began, giving an extra push for all things British (also see Barry Miles, under External links). Some observers have noted that U.S. teenagers were growing tired of singles oriented pop acts like Fabian.

The Invasion

The Huntley-Brinkley Report aired a four-minute segment on The Beatles on 18 November 1963, and the CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace aired a story on the group on 22 November 1963, but the planned repeat of the CBS report that evening was shelved because of the assassination of USA President John Kennedy. On December 10, 1963, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite finally re-ran that CBS report, about the Beatlemania phenomenon in the United Kingdom. After seeing the report, 15-year-old Marsha Albert of Silver Spring, Maryland, wrote a letter the following day to disc jockey Carroll James at radio station WWDC asking "why can't we have music like that here in America?". On December 17 James had Miss Albert introduce "I Want to Hold Your Hand" live on the air for its American premiere. WWDC's phones lit up and Washington, D.C. area record stores were flooded with requests for a record they did not have in stock. On December 26 Capitol Records released the record three weeks ahead of schedule. The release of the record during a time when teenagers were on vacation helped spread Beatlemania in America. For the January 25, 1964 edition of Cash Box magazine (on sale January 18) "I Want to Hold Your Hand" reached number one on the chart; it did the same on Billboard's February 1 chart. On February 7, the CBS Evening News ran a story about the Beatles' United States arrival that afternoon in which the correspondent said "The British Invasion this time goes by the code name Beatlemania". Two days later (Sunday, February 9) they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Nielsen Ratings estimated that 45 percent of Americans watching television that night viewed their appearance. On April 4, the Beatles held the top 5 positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, and to date no other act has accomplished this feat. The group's massive chart success continued until they broke up in 1970.

One week after The Beatles entered the Hot 100 for the first time, Dusty Springfield, having launched a solo career, became the next British act to reach the Hot 100, with "I Only Want to Be With You", which fell just short of the top 10. She soon followed up with several other hits, becoming what Allmusic described as "the finest white soul singer of her era." During the next two years or so, Chad & Jeremy, Peter and Gordon, The Animals, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Herman's Hermits, The Rolling Stones, The Troggs, and Donovan would have one or more number one singles. Other Invasion acts included The Dave Clark Five, The Searchers, Billy J. Kramer, The Bachelors, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Honeycombs, Them (and later its lead singer, Van Morrison), Sounds Orchestral, Tom Jones, and The Yardbirds. On 8 May 1965 the British Commonwealth came closer than it ever had or would to a clean sweep of a weekly Hot 100's Top 10, lacking only a hit at number two instead of "Count Me In" by the American group Gary Lewis & The Playboys. British Invasion acts also dominated the music charts at home in the United Kingdom.

British Invasion artists played in styles now categorized either as blues-based rock music or as guitar-driven rock/pop. A second wave of the invasion occurred featuring acts such as The Who, The Zombies, and The Hollies, which were influenced by the invasion's pop side and American rock music. The musical style of British Invasion artists, such as the Beatles, was influenced by earlier American rock and roll, a genre which had lost some popularity and appeal by the time of the Invasion. White British performers essentially revived a musical genre rooted in black American culture.

The Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night and fashions from Carnaby Street led American media to proclaim England as the center of the music and fashion world. Fashion and image marked the Beatles out from their earlier American rock and roll counterparts. Their distinctive, uniform style "challenged the clothing style of conventional US males", just as their music challenged the earlier conventions of the rock and roll genre.

The Rolling Stones were perceived by the American public as a much more 'edgy' and even dangerous band. They stated themselves that they were much more influenced by black-oriented rhythm and blues. This image marked them as separate from beat artists such as the Beatles, who had become a more acceptable, parent-friendly pop group. The Rolling Stones (and also The Animals) appealed more to an 'outsider' demographic and popularized, for young people at least, the rhythm and blues genre which had been largely ignored or rejected when performed by black American artists in the 1950s.

"Freakbeat" is a term given to British Invasion acts particularly British Blues and Garage Rock acts that remain obscure. Pretty Things, Soft Machine and Status Quo are acts that are associated with Freakbeat.

The emergence of a relatively homogeneous worldwide "rock" music style about 1967 marked the end of the "invasion".

Outside of music other aspects of British arts became popular in the US during this period. Besides the Bond series, films with a British sensibility such as Alfie and What's New Pussycat? and "Angry Young Man" styled London Theater and a new wave of actors such as Peter O'Toole and Micheal Caine intrigued Americans. Mary Poppins, released on 27 August 1964, became the most Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated Disney film in history, and My Fair Lady, released on 25 December 1964, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director.

Influence

The British Invasion had a profound impact on the shape of popular music. It helped internationalize the production of rock and roll, establishing the British popular music industry as a viable centre of musical creativity, and opening the door for subsequent British and Irish performers to achieve international success. In America the Invasion arguably spelled the end of such acts as instrumental surf music (though vocal surf music's peak years would include all of the mid 1960s), pre-Motown vocal girl groups, the folk revival (which adapted by evolving into folk rock), and (for a time) the teen idols that had dominated the American charts in the late 1950s and 60s. It dented the careers of established R&B acts like Fats Domino and Chubby Checker and temporarily derailed the chart success of surviving rock and roll acts, including Elvis Presley. It prompted many existing garage rock bands to adopt a sound with a British Invasion inflection, and inspired many other groups to form, creating a scene from which many major American acts of the next decade would emerge. The British Invasion also played a major part in the rise of a distinct genre of rock music, and cemented the primacy of the rock group, based around guitars and drums and producing their own material as singer-songwriters.

Though a majority of the acts associated with the invasion did not survive its end, many others would become icons of rock music. That the sound of British beat bands was not radically different from American groups like The Beach Boys, and damaged the careers of African-American and female artists, has been the subject of criticism of the Invasion, even though the Motown sound actually increased in popularity during that time.

Other American groups also demonstrated a similar sound to the British Invasion artists and in turn highlighted how the British 'sound' was not in itself a wholly new or original one. Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, for example, acknowledged the debt that American artists owed to British musicians, such as the Searchers, but that ‘‘they were using folk music licks that I was using anyway. So it’s not that big a rip-off.’’ The US Sunshine pop group The Buckinghams and the Beatles influenced US Tex-Mex act The Sir Douglas Quintet adopted British sounding names.

See also

• List of British Invasion artists
• Second British Invasion
• British rock
• Swinging London
• List of Billboard Hot 100 number-ones by British artists
• Beatlemania
• Anglophilia
• British soul invasion
• Korean wave (a.k.a. Korean Invasion)

External links

• Gilliland, John (1969). "The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming!: The U.S.A. is invaded by a wave of long-haired English rockers" (audio). Pop Chronicles. Digital.library.unt.edu. {{cite web}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Miles, Barry The British Invasion: The Music, the Times, the Era Sterling Publishing 2009 ISBN 978-1-4027-6976-4
• Harry, Bill The British Invasion: How the Beatles and Other UK Bands Conquered America Chrome Dreams 2004 ISBN 978-1-84240-247-4