The Beatles on Britannica India

Britannicaindia has an interesting article on the Liverpool quartet that took the music scene by storm in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and was the dreams and aspirations of a generation of young ones, including yours truly. Who remembers "Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band," "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "Hard Day's Night," "Back in the USSR," "While my Guitar Gently Weeps," "Strawberry Fields for Ever," and songs like that these days?

"Formed around the nucleus of Lennon and McCartney, who first performed together in Liverpool in 1957, the group grew out of a shared enthusiasm for American rock and roll. Like most early rock-and-roll figures, Lennon, a guitarist and singer, and McCartney, a bassist and singer, were largely self-taught as musicians. Precocious composers, they gathered around themselves a changing cast of accompanists, adding by the end of 1957 Harrison, a lead guitarist, and then, in 1960 for several formative months, Sutcliffe, a promising young painter who brought into the band a brooding sense of bohemian style. After dabbling in skiffle, a jaunty sort of folk music popular in Britain in the late 1950s, and assuming several different names (the Quarrymen, the Silver Beetles, and, finally, the Beatles), the band added a drummer, Best, and joined a small but booming “beat music” scene, first in Liverpool and then, during several long visits between 1960 and 1962, in Hamburg—another seaport full of sailors thirsty for American rock and roll as a backdrop for their whiskey and womanizing."

Read more in this article: Britannica India: Did you Know?: