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.

The British Invasion is a term used to describe the large number of rock and roll, beat, rock and pop performers from the United Kingdom who became popular in the United States during the period from 1964 through 1966.

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 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". Young British groups started to combine various British and American styles. This coalesced in Liverpool during 1962 in what became known as Merseybeat, hence the "beat boom". In 1962 "Telstar", an instrumental by The Tornados became the first U.S. number 1 single by a British rock act. Also that year the folk trio The Springfields featuring Dusty Springfield cracked the U.S. top 20.

The Invasion

On December 10, 1963 the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite ran a story 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 Albert introduce "I Want to Hold Your Hand" live on the air, the first airing of a Beatles song in the United States. 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. On January 18, 1964, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" reached number one on the Cash Box chart, the following week it did the same on Billboard. 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. Seventy five 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, the only time to date that any act has accomplished this. The group's massive chart success continued until they broke up in 1970.

Dusty Springfield, having launched a solo career, became the first non-Beatle act during the invasion to have a major U.S. hit with "I Only Want to Be With You". She followed with several other hits becoming and has been described by Allmusic as the finest white soul music singer of her era. During the next two years, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Chad & Jeremy, Peter and Gordon, The Animals, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders,Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, Herman's Hermits, The Rolling Stones, The Troggs, and Donovan would have one or more number one singles. Other acts that were part of the invasion included The Kinks and The Dave Clark Five. 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 and The Zombies which were influenced by the invasion's pop side and American rock music.

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.

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

A Second Invasion occurred during the 1980s consisting of acts primarily popularized by the cable music channel MTV. While acts with a wide variety of styles were part of the invasion, New Wave and New Wave-influenced acts predominated.

Influence

The British Invasion had a profound impact on the shape of popular music. It helped internationalize the production of rock'n'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 scenes as instrumental surf music, vocal girl groups 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'n'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.

Criticism

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 in the United States. American singer Willy DeVille said the invaders played a watered-down version of American music and pushed aside talented American artists such as Ben E. King and Smokey Robinson, adding that Americans, by favoring "anything that fucking glittered", fell for a "big money complicated political con game".

See also

• List of British Invasion artists
• Beatlemania
• Korean wave (a.k.a. Korean Invasion)
• Anglophilia
• Uruguayan Invasion