How the Beatles Changed the World 
Do we thank Hitler for the dank irony that his twisted vision of a tyrannical Reich created the perfect climate for the great wave of cultural change that followed in its wake? Would the Sixties have been what they were without him? And the Twenties. A decade you would have loved to have lived through were it not for the knowledge that it was sandwiched, more or less, between the two world wars. Would the Flapper era and the Jazz Age now so closely associated with F Scott Fitzgerald have been what they were without the draconian mayhem that had been their precursor? And does this have any meaning for our current mess of a world?
The correlation between the Twenties and the Sixties fascinates me. If you’re the child of parents who fought on the side of the Allies in World War II, and knew, palpably, the effect it had on them, on their psyches, and their manners, foibles and fears, and if you’re a thinking person, all sorts of things make sense. You become, the more you think, a teenager who wants to be much unlike your parents. If your dad wore his hair short, back and sides, and took you to the barber’s every Wednesday at two o’clock even though, looking in a mirror, your hair apparently hasn’t grown a millimetre, you grow up wanting your hair to grow long and lush. If your dad wore boring trousers, a blazer and his club tie, you were going to grow up to want some colour in your shirt, no collar, and powder blue denim jeans. By the time you were a teenager, your dad might think you delinquent, an unknowable creature from another world and time. Because it was. That’s how different those two generations were in the Sixties. It’s where pop rebellion was born, right there, in 1963, to be precise. When you were just eight.
It mattered not where you were. We were in a tiny diamond town sandwiched between nothing and nowhere, desert on all sides but for the taunting river that ran through it. But the Sixties seeped itself into our consciousness through the music and the magazines. We soaked everything up, and as soon as the parents were looking the other way we’d throw ourselves right into this new cultural revolution.
Looking back, from now till then, from the older man to the little boy on the verge of adolescence, I find my mind casting further back to the kids whose parents had come out of the earlier Great War, and how the fashions alone of that time – the time of my grandparents – were so gobsmackingly different from those of the Edwardian era we now probably know best from the earlier episodes of Downton Abbey. The Flapper dresses with fringed hems that swayed this way and that to the Charlston, itself so different from the Vaudeville and drawing room recitals of only a handful of years earlier.
But my generation was given a very special, if often troubling and always complex, slice of the planet’s cultural history. We call it the Sixties, and all of it, from the fashion and the psychedelic colours to the music and the very spirit of the decade, centres on four young men from Liverpool. The Beatles.
Buried somewhere on Netflix is How The Beatles Changed the World, a riveting documentary which clearly, from first-hand accounts of those who were at the epicentre of it, sets out quite why the claim in the show’s title is true. It seems a somewhat wild claim to make – it’s easy to ask, but how do we know the decade would have turned out very differently if the Beatles had not happened? But that’s because everything that happened in their wake, and which sprang from what they did, how they made music and how they dressed and conducted themselves (itself groundbreaking for their time), has been affected by them. Before them, singers and band members when interviewed would answer ever so politely. The Beatles chirped. Seems so ordinary now, but back then it raised eyebrows and brought frowns of disapproval.
And the sounds we hear on the charts today are still massively influenced by the Beatles. Many contemporary acts openly cite them as influences. And it’s not 20 years ago today, not 30 years ago today, not even 40 years ago today. Right now it’s 55 years since the Beatles broke out of smoke-filled nightclubs and into the new world’s consciousness.
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That was 1963, the year the Sixties started, because there’s a differentiation between the decade of the Sixties and the Cultural Decade of the Sixties. The “Cultural Sixties” began in 1963 – when the Beatles became a phenomenon, after a quiet start in 1962 – and lasted until 1973, write the historians of this sort of thing. What came before was, first of all, That War. Followed by deep austerity and crimping rations. The ones your parents told you about and which had everything to do with them being careful with, and respectful of, money and possessions for the rest of their lives.
The (cultural) Fifties had begun, right there in 1950, with a man called Johnnie Ray – a white guy who played halls filled with African-Americans, and who won their respect – who released a single called Cry. Though a slow, country-tinged ballad, it contained in its riffs the beginnings of what was to become Rock ‘n’ Roll. Listen to it, and try to imagine it revved up a bit, as it might have been if it had come out five years later. By then the world of American pop music had changed forever.