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 from 1964 through 1966.[1]
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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 mostly failed, the trad jazz-inspired skiffle craze,[2] with its "do it yourself" attitude, was the starting point of several British acts that would later be part of the "invasion". Lonnie Donegan, who is credited with singlehandedly popularizing skiffle in the UK, had a top 20 US hit with "Rock Island Line" during the 1950s and a top ten US hit with "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight?)" in 1961, both re-recordings of songs already known in the U.S. for several decades at the time.[3][4] 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".[5][6][7][8] In 1962 "Telstar", an instrumental by The Tornados, became the first U.S. number 1 single by a British rock act.[9] Also that year the folk trio The Springfields featuring Dusty Springfield cracked the U.S. top 20.[10]
On December 10, 1963, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite ran a story about the Beatlemania phenomenon in the United Kingdom.[11] 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?".[11] 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.[11] 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.[11] On December 26 Capitol Records released the record three weeks ahead of schedule.[11] The release of the record during a time when teenagers were on vacation helped spread Beatlemania in America.[11] 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.[11] 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".[12] Two days later (Sunday, February 9) they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Nielsen Ratings estimated that 45 percent of Americans watching television that night viewed their appearance.[8] 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.[8][13] The group's massive chart success continued until they broke up in 1970.[8]
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 soon followed up with several other hits, becoming what Allmusic described as "the finest white soul singer of her era."[10] During the next two years, Chad & Jeremy, Peter and Gordon, The Animals, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Herman's Hermits, The Rolling Stones, The Troggs, and Donovan would have one or more number one singles.[5] Other acts that were part of the invasion included The Kinks and The Dave Clark Five.[8] British Invasion acts also dominated the music charts at home in the United Kingdom.[14]
British Invasion artists played in styles now categorized either as blues-based rock music or as guitar-driven rock/pop.[14] 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.[14] The musical style of British Invasion artists, such as the Beatles, was influenced by earlier American rock and roll, a genre which had lost some popularity and appeal by the time of the Invasion. White British performers essentially revived a musical genre rooted in black American culture.[15]
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.[5] Fashion and image marked the Beatles out from their earlier American rock and roll counterparts. Their distinctive, uniform style "challenged the clothing style of conventional US males", just as their music challenged the earlier conventions of the rock and roll genre.[16]
The Rolling Stones were perceived by the American public as a much more 'edgy' and even dangerous band. They stated themselves that they were much more influenced by black-oriented rhythm and blues. This image marked them as separate from beat artists such as the Beatles, who had become a more acceptable, parent-friendly pop group. The Stones appealed more to an 'outsider' demographic and popularized, for young people at least, the rhythm and blues genre which had been largely ignored or rejected when performed by black American artists in the 1950s.[16]
The emergence of a relatively homogeneous worldwide "rock" music style about 1967 marked the end of the "invasion".[5]
The British Invasion had a profound impact on the shape of popular music. It helped internationalize the production of rock and roll, establishing the British popular music industry as a viable centre of musical creativity,[17] and opening the door for subsequent British and Irish performers to achieve international success.[14] 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.[18] It dented the careers of established R&B acts like Fats Domino and Chubby Checker and temporarily derailed the chart success of surviving rock and roll acts, including Elvis Presley.[19] 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.[20] 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.[21]
Though a majority of the acts associated with the invasion did not survive its end, many others would become icons of rock music.[14] 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,[22] has been the subject of criticism of the invasion in the United States.
Other American groups also demonstrated a similar sound to the British Invasion artists and in turn highlighted how the British 'sound' was not in itself a wholly new or original one.[23] Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, for example, acknowledged the debt that American artists owed to British musicians, such as the Searchers, but that ‘‘they were using folk music licks that I was using anyway. So it’s not that big a rip-off.’’.[24] The US Sunshine pop group the The Buckinghams and the Beatles influenced US Tex-Mex act The Sir Douglas Quintet to adopt British sounding names.[25][26][27]
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