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You know you’ve made it in pop music stature when you’re universally known by an honorific.
Up there with ‘The King’, ‘The Boss’, and the ‘Godfather of Soul’, the ‘Fab Four’ is probably the most perfect capture of a band’s dizzying rise on all fronts, illustrating a quartet of fun characters you need to get acquainted with, bottling the feverish pop explosion ready to score the incipient youthquake on the UK and the world, and perfectly alliterative to spread itself like catchy wildfire among the media landscape.
It served The Beatles well. The moniker was more or less nailed on to their publicity around the time of ‘Love Me Do’s release in late 1962, providing a key accelerator to their surge that immediately chimed with the swelling popularity. For any young fan first nabbing their 45 single, The Beatles Book magazine, or any one of the mountain of shoddily licensed merchandise, the ‘Fab Four’ stood as an informal counter to the established band name, a term sharing an exciting proximity to a new generation of kids swept up in a pop upheaval following a band entirely theirs.
Beatlemania would take no time to dominate the UK charts, then hurtle across Europe before cracking America following the band’s US TV debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. Armed with their ready-made sobriquet, the ‘Fab Four’ arrived gift-packaged for an eager press to symbolise the four lads from Liverpool’s pop cultural phenomenon and their ushering of the British invasion. It more than did the job, no doubt surpassing in the decade’s lexicon light-years further than its coiner could ever have anticipated.
So, who really coined the term ‘Fab Four’?
Hailing from the same Merseyside area, Tony Barrow was already something of a seasoned music journalist before first crossing paths with The Beatles, reviewing the latest releases in rock and pop for the local Liverpool Echo while still a sixth-form schoolboy.
Such pursuits eventually led to a decamp to London and a gig penning liner notes for Decca Records. Barrow’s work was spotted by one ambitious manager from his hometown, eager for an unsigned dancehall hopeful a mention in the Liverpool Echo columns he maintained from the capital, resulting in the arrangement of The Beatles’ failed audition for Decca and later signing to EMI’s Parlophone.
No review ever happened either, because there was no record to actually review when Brian Epstein had made contact, but Barrow was invited to join the former’s North End Music Stores Enterprises to act as PR and publicity officer for The Beatles on the cusp of fame. Barrow was full of ideas, pushing the importance of phone interviews to the big papers and coming up with the flexidisc Christmas messages sent out to fan club members.
Further reading: From The Vault
His most enduring masterstroke, however, was the eternal nickname. It’s often forgotten that back in the early 1960s, a band without a clear frontman and boasting all members contributing lead vocals by varying degrees was a rarity and potential marketing headache. Dropping ‘Fab Four’ in their early promotional materials and press kits, suddenly The Beatles’ ambiguities became their strength, pushing the band as four essential individuals that fans could assign their favourite just like any pop group today, as well as celebrating the internal creative energy shared within the unit, over perceptions of any one Beatle implicitly served by a backing band.
Barrow’s PR branding swiftly became entrenched in the band’s rise and rise, ‘Fab Four’ standing as the default term for when the four lads from Liverpool took the world’s pop charts by storm, and a chapter name of Beatlemania’s frenzy before their psychedelic maturation only a few short years later.
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