When I watched "Bohemian Rhapsody" and heard Queen's manager list all the acts performing for Live Aid in 1985, it hit me how they were nearly all British.
When I visited London in 1980, it was, to mea clearly the rock music capital of the world, and I was a loyal citizen of Los Angeles, living a few blocks from Laurel Canyon (on the bad side of the Hollywood Hills, granted).
I don't know how old you are, but for those who are under 50 or so, Live Aid was performed in both London and Philadelphia. As a general rule, the British/Irish acts performed at Wembley while the American/Canadian acts performed at JFK.
Perhaps they were on tour in the US or they were living here, but Judas Priest, Simple Minds, Eric Clapton, and Led Zeppelin all performed here.
Pointing out those names reinforces just how British dominated it was, actually. I didn't even know Judas Priest was of English origin until I just looked them up now.
Another band that played the Philadelphia show was the Pretenders. Having been tipped off, I was at the tiny Chestnut Cabaret the night before to see them do a warm up show for the big event. It was a night to remember. They were definitely a British group despite being fronted by the very charismatic Ohioan, Chrissy Hynde.
You've touched on one of my favorite subjects here:
October 2022 was the sixtieth anniversary of a song that ignited the extraordinary – and at times hysterical – global pop phenomenon that has since come to be known as Brit Pop. I first heard the song, aged twelve, on Radio Luxembourg as it came crackling out of the raffia speaker panel on our walnut-veneered radiogram. Love Me Do - The Beatles’ first UK hit - is, in itself, nothing special. But it was that spark. By early 1964 the British Invasion of the USA was underway. She Loves You was topping the charts simultaneously right across the Western world. The following year I Can’t Get No Satisfaction was doing the same. Tuning in on Thursday night to the BBC hit parade show Top of the Pops had become, for every British teenager, a once-week tv Scale A parade.
The hitherto all-dominant American pop industry greeted this British Invasion with shock and disbelief. The Brits?... rockin’ and rollin’?...Whaat! Head-scratching, almost wounded dismay was an initial reaction; one captured some years later in Don McClean’s American Pie. But from the mid 60s on, the pop industry on both sides of the Atlantic came to be mutually energising; exploding exponentially into the cultural tsunami that was (is?) Rock/Pop Music........https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak
The Beatles' 1962 single "Love Me Do" is pretty awful. The next year they are releasing "I Want to Hold Your Hand,", then in 1964 All My Loving and Hard Day's Night, then in 1965
Ticket to Ride, Yesterday, Day Tripper. Then in 1966 Nowhere Man, Paperback writer, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields, 1968 the ultimate two side single Hey Jude / Revolution. 1969: Something/Come Together.
Yes, like I said "nothing special". The article I linked to is about the history of rock (1960-now)...not about The Beatles . Its main theme is: "What songs will endure when all rock’s ephemera evaporates into the mist of time?" Love Me Do got a mention just because it did actually kick off the explosion in the UK. At the risk of being 'cancelled' by some, I actually think The Beatles have become hugely overrated in the history. If you were a Brit teenager heavily into Rock in the 60s (as I was) you would probably rate The Stones much higher...as well as Bob Dylan for example.
Maybe 60 doesn't resonate as well as 50, but I was surprised that the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was barely acknowledged when the 60th anniversary passed in February. When the 50th passed I remember it being a Very Big Deal.
No, you're right ScarletN....60 doesn't resonate as well as 50...but when you need a hook line for an article you want to write, you just need to take what you can get. Or wait another 40 years!
I think the fact that the UK lacked a significant black population and Americans’ peculiar attitude to race made a big difference.
Simply put in 1964 England rock’n’roll was just a sound, it didn’t have any major social connotations. Music was just music.
A few notable black US jazz musicians moved to Europe as there was less racism. Likewise the Rolling Stones in 1964 couldn’t really understand why there were black clubs and white clubs when they first visited the US.
I think this meant much easier cross-pollination of musical ideas in the UK.
Amphetamines played a big role as a performance enhancing drug in the UK. The British military handed out a zillion uppers during WWII to keep soldiers awake. Their kids took them to dance all night, but less as a recreational or creative drug.
I have a third-hand Paul McCartney story that is utterly charming:
A friend was working at Jim Henson studios during a time when Paul McCartney was working on something with the Muppets for a couple weeks. Two observations:
-- Sir Paul drove himself across LA to the studio almost every day in his ice-blue 1984 Corvette (*). He just really liked driving, and he loved his car.
-- For the first week at least, one of the most famous people in the world kept trying to show the security guards at the gate his ID, since the sign said "All visitors must present ID." "Ummm ... Sir .... we know who you are." "Oh, well thanks, mate!"
Delayed reaction indeed. Brilliant analysis. John Mayall, the father of British blues and rock guitar passed away yesterday. His Career was epic. As was the British Invasion.
Steve: what about your theory that British boys were more likely to have a really close “mate” or friend with whom he could indulge in music learning/playing with? This may explain British dominance in bands as opposed to American individual stars. Americans had more individualistic tendencies as well as more materialistic distractions and wealth in the 50s and 60s that made the starting of a band less of a priority. Also American kids had multiple sports, and other civic or church endeavors that probably gave them less time to create a band. In post War-UK, it was likely either soccer or start a Band. And it was more quickly becoming a secular nation than the US.
Was the popularity of the Brits due to their tendency to form groups rather than stars with backup bands? Or was the popularity of groups due to the Brits liking to do that?
Per Rick Beato, American rockers did eventually transition to recreating the recording. Definitely by the time I was a teenager in the late 1970s era of 'arena rock' the goal was for the live performance to sound like the record, except for a few bands like the Grateful Dead.
I was reading something about John Lennon (forget the name) and the author pointed out that the Brits got rid of national service at just the right time. Anyone born after October 1 1939 was exempted. Ringo and John were born in July and October of 1940.
Phew!
If the British still had the draft, the lads would have been doing KP for 18 months rather than honing their craft in that rathskeller.
Just one of many reasons of course, but definitely a factor.
"It’s not as if the mighty USA had no tradition of rock ‘n’ roll."
Um, is that British understatement? We invented it.
This is going to sound stupid, but one point that British (and Irish) bands have in their favor is that they don't sing in a British accent. Therefore, if you are a casual music fan, you may not even realize that a particular song is being sung by someone across the pond.
The biggest exception to this rule seems to be Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits.
I was sitting in the waiting room at Heathrow Airport in 1965 when a nattily dressed young man with hair down to his collar walked in. A girl screamed, "It's a Beatle!" I was too shy, but I dispatched my mother to get the Beatle's autograph. She returned with the autograph of Peter Noone.
British rock was operating at a completely different level than anything else in the world. I'm not sure there is a reason why. It just was.
And today we wonder why there is a famine of good rock. Why is the bulk of rock music played today from 50 years ago? Perhaps it is because it was so good. Genius happened and we are left wondering for generations after how it happened, and we will never know.
I wonder if it had something to do with geography. Britain is about the size of what, Alabama? A lot easier for ideas and news to spread quickly, so as a sound took off in, say, London, it could travel quickly to Manchester, etc. vs NY to Chicago to LA. On another note, I recall reading one or more articles over the years about it being easier in some ways for an outsider to interpret / distill a foreign culture. I also wonder if the US servicemen who were stationed in Britain during WWII brought with them American music and maybe shared it with the Brits?
The second graph: The cause of the drop in births in the late 1910s is not "1918 influenza," but clearly the major disruptions associated with U.S. entry into the European war.
The 1917-19 period was an underappreciated revolution. (For one, a sudden labor-demand for the war was the very start of serious beachheads by Blacks in northern U.S. cities, population-beachheads would fill in over coming decades, in the process "tilting" many of those cities, in part or in whole, towards post-Western landscapes over coming decades to the point that the word "urban" and the word "Black" became almost synonymous, or "urban" became a euphemism for Black, by the late-20th century, as with the so-called "Urban & Contemporary" music-genre [read: Black music]).
The European belligerents showed birth drop-offs that lasted the entirety of the 1914-18 period and then partially recovered with big post-war rises in births.
The overall graph of U.S. births misses the important thing: the changing composition of those births, the White portion declining and being "replaced" by others. I show that in these graphs:
Look at Heavy Metal. Invented by the British, perfected by the British in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the early 80s; Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, etc etc. First serious American heavy metal band is Van Halen, with an LA touch to the genre.
I'm not sure I would put Van Halen in the "Heavy Metal" category. Both Van Halen and Rush featured a loud guitar and drums, but they were different than AC / DC, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. And then there is Aerosmith. I'm not sure how to group them.
American rock was just different than British rock. It was either influenced by country / bluegrass like the Eagles or influenced by pop like Van Halen. By the 1980s, most American rock was pop-rock - Aerosmith and Van Halen embraced pop-rock with great success. Rush just kept doing its thing which was to constantly change styles.
I wouldn't classify Aerosmith, Van Halen, or Rush as heavy metal. I would say that American metal started with Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Skid Row, with Metallica taking it to another level.
Well that’s why That Metal Show was called the show of hard rock and heavy metal. A fair point. 20 years ago I wouldn’t have called Van Halen heavy metal either.
There was perhaps more cultural particularity in Britain at the time that fed into different scenes: e.g., Judas Priest and Black Sabbath who pioneered hard rock were Brummies from industrial Birmingham. Blues rock, growing out of trad jazz, such as the Yardbirds, Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix Experience, ruled in the southern suburbs of London. The Beatles and the Merseybeat scene grew out of skiffle, which was something likes bluegrass crossed with the music hall tradition. In contrast early American rock’n’roll seems somewhat confined to the Scots-Irish southern Bible belt.
Art school ubiquity is an interesting point, and ties in with the welfare state. Notice it’s “art school”, not university, and not conservatory. Garage rock combos were common on both sides of the pond, but American boys were expected to get to work and/or college by 18. British teens were probably expected NOT to go to university unless they were very brainy, or a mix of brainy and wealthy. The expanding welfare system meant that they could pursue their rock & roll dream on the dole, while The Magnifi Cats had to get jobs
Bob Dylan commented in his autobiography that most American rock groups before the Beatles had a pseudo-menacing aesthetic cribbed from the mob. British groups brought a wider range of influences — it wasn’t long before the Beatles and Stones were dressing in pseudo-Shakespearean or Edwardian outfits. And the cultural mixture was fertile: e.g., the Beatles’ Spike Milligan-esque punning and wordplay, and older influences too; the Stones’ first original Jagger-Richards composition “As Tears Go By” sounds almost like a Tudor ballad like “Greensleeves”.
I like the thesis of girl adoration playing a key role in British invasion success.
American rock n roll pioneers were either black or hillbillies: a 14 year old white American girl in 1965 would have a hard time projecting an idealized romance on to either that would fit into her "social imaginary". Elvis was so charismatic he managed to escape hillbilly gravitational pull. But all the cute British boys in suits, especially the ease with which they could carry off fey sexiness (ruffled Edwardian shirtfronts) of the sort that became fashionable in the late 60s: rawwwr. Korean boy bands are doing the same thing today. Wonderful masculine bone structure, recently emerged from soft adolescence, presented with bows on.
There was of course Bob Dylan, Paul Simon (plus sidekick) and Leonard Cohen (my teen heroes) but I suspect their appeal was much more to boys than girls.
This seems a needlessly peevish reply I have to say. I was responding to your comment about Elvis and 'American rock n roll pioneers' .....who weren't British either.
When I watched "Bohemian Rhapsody" and heard Queen's manager list all the acts performing for Live Aid in 1985, it hit me how they were nearly all British.
When I visited London in 1980, it was, to mea clearly the rock music capital of the world, and I was a loyal citizen of Los Angeles, living a few blocks from Laurel Canyon (on the bad side of the Hollywood Hills, granted).
I don't know how old you are, but for those who are under 50 or so, Live Aid was performed in both London and Philadelphia. As a general rule, the British/Irish acts performed at Wembley while the American/Canadian acts performed at JFK.
Perhaps they were on tour in the US or they were living here, but Judas Priest, Simple Minds, Eric Clapton, and Led Zeppelin all performed here.
Pointing out those names reinforces just how British dominated it was, actually. I didn't even know Judas Priest was of English origin until I just looked them up now.
Another band that played the Philadelphia show was the Pretenders. Having been tipped off, I was at the tiny Chestnut Cabaret the night before to see them do a warm up show for the big event. It was a night to remember. They were definitely a British group despite being fronted by the very charismatic Ohioan, Chrissy Hynde.
I saw The Pretenders on the list and didn't include them because Hynde is famously a Buckeye, but it turns out she is a dual citizen.
As an aside, their song My City Was Gone was used by Rush Limbaugh for years as his theme song.
You've touched on one of my favorite subjects here:
October 2022 was the sixtieth anniversary of a song that ignited the extraordinary – and at times hysterical – global pop phenomenon that has since come to be known as Brit Pop. I first heard the song, aged twelve, on Radio Luxembourg as it came crackling out of the raffia speaker panel on our walnut-veneered radiogram. Love Me Do - The Beatles’ first UK hit - is, in itself, nothing special. But it was that spark. By early 1964 the British Invasion of the USA was underway. She Loves You was topping the charts simultaneously right across the Western world. The following year I Can’t Get No Satisfaction was doing the same. Tuning in on Thursday night to the BBC hit parade show Top of the Pops had become, for every British teenager, a once-week tv Scale A parade.
The hitherto all-dominant American pop industry greeted this British Invasion with shock and disbelief. The Brits?... rockin’ and rollin’?...Whaat! Head-scratching, almost wounded dismay was an initial reaction; one captured some years later in Don McClean’s American Pie. But from the mid 60s on, the pop industry on both sides of the Atlantic came to be mutually energising; exploding exponentially into the cultural tsunami that was (is?) Rock/Pop Music........https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak
The Beatles' 1962 single "Love Me Do" is pretty awful. The next year they are releasing "I Want to Hold Your Hand,", then in 1964 All My Loving and Hard Day's Night, then in 1965
Ticket to Ride, Yesterday, Day Tripper. Then in 1966 Nowhere Man, Paperback writer, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields, 1968 the ultimate two side single Hey Jude / Revolution. 1969: Something/Come Together.
These guys were good.
Yes, like I said "nothing special". The article I linked to is about the history of rock (1960-now)...not about The Beatles . Its main theme is: "What songs will endure when all rock’s ephemera evaporates into the mist of time?" Love Me Do got a mention just because it did actually kick off the explosion in the UK. At the risk of being 'cancelled' by some, I actually think The Beatles have become hugely overrated in the history. If you were a Brit teenager heavily into Rock in the 60s (as I was) you would probably rate The Stones much higher...as well as Bob Dylan for example.
The quality of recorded output of the Beatles in a mere seven years is simply unparalleled since then.
> sixtieth anniversary
Maybe 60 doesn't resonate as well as 50, but I was surprised that the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was barely acknowledged when the 60th anniversary passed in February. When the 50th passed I remember it being a Very Big Deal.
No, you're right ScarletN....60 doesn't resonate as well as 50...but when you need a hook line for an article you want to write, you just need to take what you can get. Or wait another 40 years!
I think the fact that the UK lacked a significant black population and Americans’ peculiar attitude to race made a big difference.
Simply put in 1964 England rock’n’roll was just a sound, it didn’t have any major social connotations. Music was just music.
A few notable black US jazz musicians moved to Europe as there was less racism. Likewise the Rolling Stones in 1964 couldn’t really understand why there were black clubs and white clubs when they first visited the US.
I think this meant much easier cross-pollination of musical ideas in the UK.
Drugs ? Any role ?
Amphetamines played a big role as a performance enhancing drug in the UK. The British military handed out a zillion uppers during WWII to keep soldiers awake. Their kids took them to dance all night, but less as a recreational or creative drug.
Simon Reynold is really good on the impact of all the various drugs.
Thank u
I’m voting for “boyish charm”. My wife still gets all weepy when she sees Sir Paul on the TV. 60+ years!
My wife paid $500 to see Paul McCartney perform recently. He sang superbly a few weeks short of his 80th birthday.
We lived in London for 9 years…once saw McCartney at a table in a restaurant. He was a performer, even while dining; regaling his tablemates.
My wife had to be dragged out the door. (The meal didn’t cost $500)
I suspect Paul McCartney had made more people happy than anybody else who has ever lived.
I have a third-hand Paul McCartney story that is utterly charming:
A friend was working at Jim Henson studios during a time when Paul McCartney was working on something with the Muppets for a couple weeks. Two observations:
-- Sir Paul drove himself across LA to the studio almost every day in his ice-blue 1984 Corvette (*). He just really liked driving, and he loved his car.
-- For the first week at least, one of the most famous people in the world kept trying to show the security guards at the gate his ID, since the sign said "All visitors must present ID." "Ummm ... Sir .... we know who you are." "Oh, well thanks, mate!"
Would Walt Disney be a close second?
Nostalgia?
Delayed reaction indeed. Brilliant analysis. John Mayall, the father of British blues and rock guitar passed away yesterday. His Career was epic. As was the British Invasion.
Steve: what about your theory that British boys were more likely to have a really close “mate” or friend with whom he could indulge in music learning/playing with? This may explain British dominance in bands as opposed to American individual stars. Americans had more individualistic tendencies as well as more materialistic distractions and wealth in the 50s and 60s that made the starting of a band less of a priority. Also American kids had multiple sports, and other civic or church endeavors that probably gave them less time to create a band. In post War-UK, it was likely either soccer or start a Band. And it was more quickly becoming a secular nation than the US.
It less likely
Good points.
Was the popularity of the Brits due to their tendency to form groups rather than stars with backup bands? Or was the popularity of groups due to the Brits liking to do that?
Per Rick Beato, American rockers did eventually transition to recreating the recording. Definitely by the time I was a teenager in the late 1970s era of 'arena rock' the goal was for the live performance to sound like the record, except for a few bands like the Grateful Dead.
I was reading something about John Lennon (forget the name) and the author pointed out that the Brits got rid of national service at just the right time. Anyone born after October 1 1939 was exempted. Ringo and John were born in July and October of 1940.
Phew!
If the British still had the draft, the lads would have been doing KP for 18 months rather than honing their craft in that rathskeller.
Just one of many reasons of course, but definitely a factor.
"It’s not as if the mighty USA had no tradition of rock ‘n’ roll."
Um, is that British understatement? We invented it.
This is going to sound stupid, but one point that British (and Irish) bands have in their favor is that they don't sing in a British accent. Therefore, if you are a casual music fan, you may not even realize that a particular song is being sung by someone across the pond.
The biggest exception to this rule seems to be Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits.
I was sitting in the waiting room at Heathrow Airport in 1965 when a nattily dressed young man with hair down to his collar walked in. A girl screamed, "It's a Beatle!" I was too shy, but I dispatched my mother to get the Beatle's autograph. She returned with the autograph of Peter Noone.
What a nice mom!
British rock was operating at a completely different level than anything else in the world. I'm not sure there is a reason why. It just was.
And today we wonder why there is a famine of good rock. Why is the bulk of rock music played today from 50 years ago? Perhaps it is because it was so good. Genius happened and we are left wondering for generations after how it happened, and we will never know.
I wonder if it had something to do with geography. Britain is about the size of what, Alabama? A lot easier for ideas and news to spread quickly, so as a sound took off in, say, London, it could travel quickly to Manchester, etc. vs NY to Chicago to LA. On another note, I recall reading one or more articles over the years about it being easier in some ways for an outsider to interpret / distill a foreign culture. I also wonder if the US servicemen who were stationed in Britain during WWII brought with them American music and maybe shared it with the Brits?
The second graph: The cause of the drop in births in the late 1910s is not "1918 influenza," but clearly the major disruptions associated with U.S. entry into the European war.
The 1917-19 period was an underappreciated revolution. (For one, a sudden labor-demand for the war was the very start of serious beachheads by Blacks in northern U.S. cities, population-beachheads would fill in over coming decades, in the process "tilting" many of those cities, in part or in whole, towards post-Western landscapes over coming decades to the point that the word "urban" and the word "Black" became almost synonymous, or "urban" became a euphemism for Black, by the late-20th century, as with the so-called "Urban & Contemporary" music-genre [read: Black music]).
The European belligerents showed birth drop-offs that lasted the entirety of the 1914-18 period and then partially recovered with big post-war rises in births.
The overall graph of U.S. births misses the important thing: the changing composition of those births, the White portion declining and being "replaced" by others. I show that in these graphs:
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/white-birth-share-percentage-in-the-usa-1925-2025-b.png
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/births-in-the-usa-by-race-of-mother-1989-to-2022-b-2.png
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2023/07/11/americas-demographic-crisis-on-developments-in-births-in-the-usa-in-the-early-2020s-and-1920s-to-2022/
Look at Heavy Metal. Invented by the British, perfected by the British in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the early 80s; Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, etc etc. First serious American heavy metal band is Van Halen, with an LA touch to the genre.
I'm not sure I would put Van Halen in the "Heavy Metal" category. Both Van Halen and Rush featured a loud guitar and drums, but they were different than AC / DC, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. And then there is Aerosmith. I'm not sure how to group them.
American rock was just different than British rock. It was either influenced by country / bluegrass like the Eagles or influenced by pop like Van Halen. By the 1980s, most American rock was pop-rock - Aerosmith and Van Halen embraced pop-rock with great success. Rush just kept doing its thing which was to constantly change styles.
I wouldn't classify Aerosmith, Van Halen, or Rush as heavy metal. I would say that American metal started with Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Skid Row, with Metallica taking it to another level.
Well that’s why That Metal Show was called the show of hard rock and heavy metal. A fair point. 20 years ago I wouldn’t have called Van Halen heavy metal either.
There was perhaps more cultural particularity in Britain at the time that fed into different scenes: e.g., Judas Priest and Black Sabbath who pioneered hard rock were Brummies from industrial Birmingham. Blues rock, growing out of trad jazz, such as the Yardbirds, Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix Experience, ruled in the southern suburbs of London. The Beatles and the Merseybeat scene grew out of skiffle, which was something likes bluegrass crossed with the music hall tradition. In contrast early American rock’n’roll seems somewhat confined to the Scots-Irish southern Bible belt.
Art school ubiquity is an interesting point, and ties in with the welfare state. Notice it’s “art school”, not university, and not conservatory. Garage rock combos were common on both sides of the pond, but American boys were expected to get to work and/or college by 18. British teens were probably expected NOT to go to university unless they were very brainy, or a mix of brainy and wealthy. The expanding welfare system meant that they could pursue their rock & roll dream on the dole, while The Magnifi Cats had to get jobs
Bob Dylan commented in his autobiography that most American rock groups before the Beatles had a pseudo-menacing aesthetic cribbed from the mob. British groups brought a wider range of influences — it wasn’t long before the Beatles and Stones were dressing in pseudo-Shakespearean or Edwardian outfits. And the cultural mixture was fertile: e.g., the Beatles’ Spike Milligan-esque punning and wordplay, and older influences too; the Stones’ first original Jagger-Richards composition “As Tears Go By” sounds almost like a Tudor ballad like “Greensleeves”.
The Beatles were both very English and kind of Irish, which was a good combination.
I like the thesis of girl adoration playing a key role in British invasion success.
American rock n roll pioneers were either black or hillbillies: a 14 year old white American girl in 1965 would have a hard time projecting an idealized romance on to either that would fit into her "social imaginary". Elvis was so charismatic he managed to escape hillbilly gravitational pull. But all the cute British boys in suits, especially the ease with which they could carry off fey sexiness (ruffled Edwardian shirtfronts) of the sort that became fashionable in the late 60s: rawwwr. Korean boy bands are doing the same thing today. Wonderful masculine bone structure, recently emerged from soft adolescence, presented with bows on.
There was of course Bob Dylan, Paul Simon (plus sidekick) and Leonard Cohen (my teen heroes) but I suspect their appeal was much more to boys than girls.
None of them are British which is what the post was speculating about. The specific appeal of British rockers
This seems a needlessly peevish reply I have to say. I was responding to your comment about Elvis and 'American rock n roll pioneers' .....who weren't British either.