Credit: Far Out / Album Cover / Bradford Timeline
Wed 20 May 2026 21:00, UK
Florida is only about a third smaller than Britain, but to a young Tom Petty, one seemed puny and the other felt gargantuan.
“Most people come to Florida to escape something: cold weather, their past, whatever,” he told Spin back in 1989, “And they’re very content about it. I was always uncontent. I ran a little faster than Florida”. Like many youths of the postwar generation, he was hungry for something different, something to call his own; he couldn’t get by on sunbathing alone.
This mindset was defibrillated by the riff-focused pop and fizz of British pop. Exotic and otherworldly, when The Beatles landed amid a funereal February of 1964, hot on the heels of the tragic assassination of JFK, young Petty was only 13, but despite his tender age, in an instant, his bags were proverbially packed, and the guitar slung over his shoulder was his prized possession.
“In the mid-60, the British had a more romantic view of rock & roll than the States did. We didn’t take it as seriously,” he told Rolling Stone in 2010, “The energy that came with the British invasion was the difference, these guys brought the guitar to the fore. You weren’t getting guitar off The Shirelles.”
The same vague malaise that maladies millions of teenagers for reasons that are never all that clear had made Petty feel trapped in Gainesville. But now, the humble guitar felt like more than a merely metaphorical ‘axe’, as the classic rock musos like to call them, and closer to the Real McCoy: a tool Petty could use to chop away the shackling reeds of a working-class youth.
The Beatles embodied this the moment that they strolled into The Ed Sullivan Show studio. “There was a way to do it. You get your friends, and you’re a self-contained unit. And you make the music. And it looked like so much fun. It was something I identified with,” he figured.
“I had been a big fan of Elvis,” he continued; he had even met him in his youth. “But I really saw in the Beatles that here’s something I could do,” he told NPR, “I knew I could do it. It wasn’t long before there were groups springing up in garages all over the place.”
Further reading: Features
That’s pretty much how the counterculture revolution began, and at its core were liberating discs that washed over from Britain like manna from heaven. In 2010, Petty compiled the ten best of them.
Tom Petty’s 10 greatest British invasion songs: ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 
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