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Fri 28 August 2026 21:30, UK
For a lot of people, the history of music starts with The Beatles, and you can understand why.
There’s a pub in Liverpool called The Grapes, just down the road from The Cavern Club, where the Fab Four famously used to play. You see, The Cavern Club wasn’t how it is today; there was no drinking license, so punters (and bands alike) had to find somewhere else to wet their whistle before and after shows. The Beatles did this at The Grapes.
Nowadays, there are photos of the band scattered all over the walls, including one over a booth you can sit in, which shows the band having a post-show pint in that very same spot. It’s funny to look at that photo now, as those four lads had no idea just what kind of impact they were going to have, not just in the UK, not just in the US, but in the way that people viewed music around the world.
It won’t have been long after that photo that the band found themselves on a plane to the US, a bit of chart success behind them, sure, but completely oblivious to their immediate future. The moment those aircraft wheels hit tarmac, the band knew they had tapped into something previously unheard of, only heightened when they went on The Ed Sullivan Show and had more or less the entirety of the States in awe at every single note.
From that moment on, music was different. People wanted to play in bands, UK artists had an idea about how they could crack America, and getting into the music industry felt a lot more accessible to anybody who previously felt that it was an inaccessible industry. Not to mention, on a more emotional note, their songs simply sparked joy in everybody who heard them.
If we treat our current music industry as the universe, The Beatles were the Big Bang; however, similar to the literal cosmic phenomenon, there was a time before, an unaccounted for time that people should focus on more, and that was the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. The Beatles didn’t just come up with their sound out of nowhere; it was inspired by blues musicians, R&B artists, and the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, which was initially making waves a decade earlier.
The British invasion wasn’t British bands imposing their sound on America, but was essentially just British bands reminding America how good some of the music that had come out of their country previously was. Bob Dylan loved The Beatles, not just because their music was good, but because their success seemed to indirectly instil a new sense of pride into America and the music that had come from his home country.
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“America should put up statues to the Beatles,” said Dylan, “They helped give this country’s pride back to it. They used all the music we’d been listening to, everything from Little Richard to The Everly Brothers. A lot of barriers broke down, but we didn’t see it at the time because it happened too fast.”
It’s almost ironic that he had this opinion, and then for the next couple of albums that The Beatles put out, they stopped emulating the sound of those rock ‘n’ roll icons and instead tried to sound more like Bob Dylan. That’s the ever-changing shape of music, though. The Beatles took on many forms during their run together, but the style that originally propelled them to fame all came from American rock ‘n’ roll icons.
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