The introduction outlines how the book reassesses the impact of the Beatles on sixties Britain. Existing accounts have variously conceived of the Beatles as trailblazers of change, as exemplars of change or as outliers whose marginality revealed the lack of change in sixties Britain. Here the relationship between the Beatles and sixties Britain is instead conceived as one of creative tension, with the band’s divergence from societal norms provoking a full gamut of contemporary reactions: approbatory, contemptuous, ambivalent, indifferent and reformist. The book also uses different methods to study a familiar topic. It is a historical study of a subject largely studied by non-historians. Its empiricism distinguishes it from work informed by the theoretical approaches favoured by cultural critics and social scientists. It eschews the politicisation of the Beatles by writers engaged in culture wars over the sixties. It is purposely eclectic in its source materials, analytical methods and in its subject matter, which encompasses society, culture and politics. As the first book-length study of the Beatles by an academic British historian, The Beatles and Sixties Britain sets out to explain the significance of the band to twentieth-century British history, and vice versa.

The preface uses contemporary cartoons to introduce the four principal characteristics of the Beatles and their relationship to 1960s Britain, which is explored in the book. It argues that the Beatles should be understood as iconic, divisive, atypical and prefigurative. The band’s iconic status rested on more than their popularity, talent, wealth and fame. It existed because they functioned as ready-made symbols of modernity and controversy. The divisive effect of the Beatles is illustrated by opposition to their threat towards established institutions and identities. The Beatles’ atypicality, signified by their distinctive appearance, later identified them as elitist and eccentric. Once viewed as Everymen, they were associated with some of the most marginal and least popular elements of late sixties society. The prefigurative nature of the Beatles is demonstrated by the familiarity to us of the events depicted in the cartoons and the unfamiliarity of their underlying assumptions about class, gender, ethnicity and popular culture. Much of what seemed absurd to the cartoonists seems unexceptionable now. To understand the Beatles in their time, we need to examine why they often seemed so funny peculiar in 1960s Britain. To understand their legacy, we should consider why we struggle to laugh at these cartoons today.

This chapter examines how the unprecedented popularity and symbolic power of the Beatles forced politicians in Britain to attend to popular music in the 1960s. It begins by showing that parliamentarians were ill-equipped to comprehend not only the Beatles but also the new social forces with which they were associated. They reacted with a mixture of jocularity, partisan point-scoring and earnest debates over art, class, youth and the state. Their general bewilderment testified to how social and cultural change in sixties Britain exceeded the limits of the knowable and actionable in Westminster. The revolutionary left displayed more interest in and understanding of the Beatles than did Westminster politicians owing to the band members' class origins, youth appeal, anti-authoritarianism and support of certain radical causes. More broadly, left-wing writers and publications were instrumental in establishing pop music as a legitimate subject of analysis. Yet irrespective of their affiliations, most Marxists and anarchists adjudged the Beatles to be politically unsound. This was a correct analysis within its own terms, but testified to the difficulties encountered by revolutionary left organisations in accommodating countercultural values and attracting mass support among the young.

This chapter uses contemporary opinion polls to provide the necessary context in which to understand contemporary attitudes towards the Beatles. The polls under analysis encompass permissiveness in its broadest sense. They include polls about women, ethnic minorities and the young as well as those concerning abortion, the age of majority, birth control, censorship, capital punishment, corporal punishment, divorce, drugs, gambling, homosexuality, illegitimacy, prostitution, religion and suicide. The chapter introduces the concept of an ‘anti-permissive permissive society’ to account for the ambivalence of public attitudes displayed in polling data. Most people perceived a permissive society as coming into being from the 1960s onwards, but they disapproved of most of its manifestations and legislative reforms. The chapter then drills down into the raw data of opinion polls to compare attitudes towards different issues across demographic groups. The variations seen across age, gender, class, religion, region, nation, education and marital status reveal a complexity not captured in standard models of sixties Britain and provide clarity regarding which elements of British society were more permissive than others. Although the Beatles, like the typical permissive respondent, were young and male, they were in most other respects singularly unrepresentative representatives of sixties Britain.

Were the Beatles artists? From this one question flowed scores more concerning the medium, genre, performance, composition, creation, reception, dissemination, evaluation and social context of popular music. The debate over the cultural value of the Beatles was consequently as vehement as it was significant. Cultural critics joined social commentators in seeking to divine the Beatles’ representativeness, importance and desirability. Lennon and McCartney’s early compositions received some critical acclaim, Sgt. Pepper sought to blur distinctions between high and low culture and the band members’ side projects forged links with the avant-garde. To accept the Beatles as artists, however, required critics to rethink their most ingrained assumptions about art and their own status as artists, critics and intellectuals. This chapter uses contemporary commentary, scholarship and fan literature to show that the rethinking process was contested and protracted. No consensus emerged. The claims made for the Beatles' artistry, which contributed to the wider discourse elevating ‘rock’ over ‘pop’, were countered by cultural conservatives intent on exposing the Beatles as kitsch. The Beatles’ detractors were not simply curmudgeons, killjoys and contrarians, but had good reason to believe their cardinal values to be threatened by the band and their assault on cultural hierarchies.

Transformation was the leitmotif of coverage of the Beatles from 1963 to 1965. The band and their fans served as symbols of modernity who tested established institutions’ capacity for change. Scrutiny of institutions broadened out into questions of identity. Attitudes towards class and religion, gender and generation, region and nation, morality and sexuality were articulated and debated in reaction to the Beatles. Their transformative powers, whether actual or potential, led contemporaries to contemplate the possibility and desirability of social, cultural and political change in 1960s Britain. The Beatles did not carry all before them during this period, however. Beatlemania incited Beatlephobia and contemporary commentary revealed sixties Britain to be decidedly less permissive and more averse to change than its most famous sons. The Beatles nonetheless had a significant impact on discussions of social issues, both directly through their art and interviews and indirectly by generating discourses about them and what they represented. Mass culture, Americanisation, secularisation, meritocracy, female sexuality, the ‘youth question’, the ‘generation gap’ and the North-South divide looked different in light of the Beatles’ stardom.

The conclusion argues that, as artists and celebrities, the Beatles advanced ways of living, loving, thinking, looking, talking, joking, worshipping and campaigning which surprised and occasionally provoked their contemporaries. Sometimes explicitly and sometimes unwittingly, they created a distinctive vision which critiqued society as it was and imagined society as it could be. Reactions to the Beatles dealt with the weightiest of subjects, however glibly: the condition of modernity, the meaning of art, the relationship between state and society. The volume, range and fractiousness of disagreement about them from their rise to their demise caution against generalising about the sixties. The band served as a common reference point around which people could argue about the present state and future direction of society. By the end of the century, these disputes had faded in popular memory, as the oral history interviews conducted by the BBC for the Millennium Memory Bank demonstrate. Hindsight had smoothed out the conflicts, resolved the contradictions and marginalised the opposition. What remained was a nostalgic conception of the Beatles as representatives and progenitors of British culture at its zenith. Interviewees looked back to a halcyon age of affluence before Thatcherism, sex before AIDS and liberation before licentiousness.

This chapter examines public reactions to the Beatles’ mounting transgressions of social norms in the second half of their recording career. It argues that, although their popularity as a band remained undiminished, they became increasingly alienated and alienating figures within British society in four respects. First, they made little attempt to attain universal popularity. Their retirement from live performance meant no foreign tours, next to no collective press conferences, fewer photo opportunities and the shrinking of Beatlemania to a gaggle of Apple Scruffs. Second, their fabled transformational abilities often failed them, meaning that they were paradoxically at their most marginal when at their most socially engaged. Third, they associated themselves with strikingly unpopular causes. Anyone hostile to drugs, hippies, obscenity, infidelity, permissiveness, law-breaking, social protest, the rich, the far left, avant garde art, miscegenation, Americans, Indians or the Japanese had a reason to dislike the Beatles in the late 1960s. Fourth, they were no longer indulged by the popular press, which discarded the moptop caricature in favour of an equally simplistic image of them as conceited and out of touch. The chapter concludes by exploring how sex and drugs became polarising issues and provides prime examples of how the Beatles in the late sixties had gone too far.