The Beatles

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Before they became The Beatles they played in different bands. John and Paul met first and Paul contacted George who was his schoolmate. At first Pete Best played the drums and Stu Sutcliff played the bass. They dropped Pete when Ringo came in the band. They dropped Stu to on their first tour in Hamburg. Ringo had ear-lier played in a great band, he had an artist name, his real name was Richard Starkey, and he was one of Eng-land’s best drummers when he joined The Beatles.

They are all from Liverpool, in the north-west of England. All of them were born between 1940 and 1943, so they were about 20 years old when they made their first hitsongs.

In 1962 they released their first record called ”Love me do”. It wasn’t a great success from the start. But in 1963 when they came with the album ”Please, please me” and some other single records, they became famous all over Europe. In 1963 they made a few different tours around Europe. They toured for the first and only time in Sweden that year. Their first real hit was ”She loves you”, an album which sold in millions of copies. John and Paul wrote and sang almost everything in the beginning, and if George wrote anything it never became any real hit.

The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein wanted them to tour in the U.S. but The Beatles did not want to do that before one of their songs was a number one hit in the U.S. In 1964 they toured in the U.S. and they made a great success. In the U.S. they also made their last tour in 1965. They did not want to tour any more because the audi-ence shouted so much that the music was impossible to hear.

In 1965 they made one of their greatest albums, ”Help”. They also made the ”Rubber Soul” album and that is the first album in which they use a sitar, an Indian string instrument. John, and above all George Harrison be-came interested in Indian culture, religion and music.

In 1967 they made an album which many reviewers think is ”the best poprecord of all times”. It is the ”Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band”. In 1967 they also changed their music style a bit, from traditional pop and rock music to a more own style with many different instruments and ”stranger” music. John and Paul still wrote almost everything but George started writing more and better songs, and sometimes Ringo sang some of John’s or Paul’s songs. They made ”Magical mystery tour”, one of their strangest albums, in the same year.

Many of the songs was written while they were affected by different types of drugs, marijuana hash and sometimes LSD and other ”heavier drugs”. One of their songs, ”Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is maybe about LSD but John Lennon, who wrote it, said that it was about a drawing that his son Julian Lennon had made at kin-dergarten.
In 1967 they met the Indian yogi Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and they followed him to Rishikesh, a village in the north of India. There they were doing meditation and yoga. Ringo and Paul were there only a month or so, but George and John stayed longer.

They wrote very many songs in India and when they returned to England they made the ”White Album”, a double LP. On the ”White Album”, John is at his best and he wrote very many good songs, among all: ”Yer blues”, ”Everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey” and ”Revolution”, one of their few political songs. The Beatles were not so political otherwise if you don’t think that their liberal way of looking at drugs is a sort of politics.

They made two more albums: ”Let it be” and ”Abbey Road”. In 1969 they gave a concert on a roof in central London. Nobody knew about it but after a while a big crowd of people stood and stared. Later the police came and told them not to play so loud. In the end of 1969 The Beatles were split.

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