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When Paul McCartney joined Ringo Starr on stage in London for the final concert of his Goth Back tour last week, they eased into songs including “Helter Skelter” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They’ve had time to rehearse: It’s been 64 years since The Beatles first played with John Lennon and George Harrison.
McCartney is 82, more than four times the age of the then 18-year-old. However, the remaining members of The Beatles continued to play long after the deaths of Harrison and Lennon. They created half of the best-selling acts of their time and the music that ripped rock and roll from its American roots to open up the modern British music business.
It puts to shame other local industries that have disappeared since the 1960s and the latter is still going strong. The growth of UK music exports has been recorded delayed Last year, however, it still reached record levels and it is estimated that the industry will contribute £7.6bn to the economy by 2023. Singers like Adele and Ed Sheeran followed the Beatles’ path to international fame.
There is plenty of competition, with South Korean bands like Stray Kids becoming internationally successful, but British music’s distinctive qualities have been passed down through the generations, from The Beatles to Arctic Monkeys, Dua Lipa and Lewis Capaldi. As the year ends, it’s worth reflecting on this achievement.
The English language has always helped him. The fact that The Beatles wrote songs and sang in English not only helped them conquer America, but it was also part of their marketing. If you needed a translator on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, it would have been difficult to please the audience.
But behind language lies creativity. Rock and roll was American, but The Beatles and subsequent bands took the genre and gave it a British twist. While Lennon and McCartney were more familiar with musical forms and conventions, the Rolling Stones were more familiar with the blues. Add native playfulness and ingenuity.
Distance was also important. Ian Leslie, author John and PaulLennon’s and McCartney’s biographies argue that America’s simultaneous dedication and separation allowed them creative freedom. “They took American music and sold it to Americans. . . They wanted to copy it, change it, destroy it,” he says.
They come from a tradition of wordplay and humor going back to Shakespeare. It was also the result of education, especially the art schools that many songwriters went through, from Lennon to Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, David Bowie and Joe Strummer of the Clash. Adele and Amy Winehouse attended the industry-supported Brit School of Performing Arts in Croydon.
The UK music business reaped the benefits of agglomeration: when it became clear that one particularly brilliant quartet could catapult the Liverpudlian onto the world stage, others naturally sought to follow. Once a stable group of performers formed the core of the industry, the UK became a music cluster.
That cluster was aided by post-war immigration. Ska originated in Jamaica but It was revived in the 1970s by bands such as The Specials, Grime, London’s Variety, and produced artists including Stormzy. Immigration was also an important part of the British jazz revival, and helped to maintain the industry’s salutary status as a social movement.
UK music today has challenges. The careers of top music artists have remarkable longevity in the era of international tours and, like Adele’s Las Vegas residency that ended in November. But McCartney is old and so are the Stones and Elton John on their farewell tour It’s broken $939 million UK has a great back catalog but needs to keep freshening up.
International competition is very strong. American Taylor Swift is the highest-grossing artist in the world and there is no UK band included in the top 10 for 2023 by trade group IFPI. The newest musical invasion comes from South Korea, with Seventeen, Stray Kids, Tomorrow’s X Together and NewJeans all on that chart. There are other problems, including post-Brexit barriers to European tours.
But the UK remains the world’s third-largest music market and the fact that others are effectively competing for fans’ attention (now in their own language) is no guarantee of failure. It means you have learned what is achievable. The Beatles and others showed that music was not an art school distraction: it was a global business.
Britain still has that creative and musical spirit, even if its economic future is less clear than it was in the early 1960s. If the government values this creative resource and helps it thrive, the band will play.
