The Beatles

The Beatles were an English rock band that took its name in Liverpool in 1960, from the Quarrymen, a skiffle group John Lennon had led since 1956, and was active until 1970. From 1962 their members were Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They recorded for EMI’s Parlophone label with the producer George Martin and released twelve albums in Britain. Lennon and McCartney wrote nearly all of their songs as a partnership, Lennon-McCartney, and Harrison wrote a growing share of the rest. In seven years the records moved from the guitar-and-harmony music of the Liverpool and Hamburg clubs, where the band had learned American rock & roll from records, to recordings built in the studio from orchestras, Indian instruments, tape loops and sounds the four could not reproduce on stage.

In Britain they had their first No. 1 single in 1963, and their first two albums followed each other at the top of the album chart. In the United States, Capitol declined their first four singles. After it released “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in December 1963 the record reached No. 1, their first live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 drew an audience estimated at 73 million, and in April 1964 they held the top five places on the Billboard Hot 100. They stopped touring after a concert in San Francisco in August 1966. They had twenty No. 1 singles in the United States, the most of any act, and eighteen in Britain, the last in 2023.

In December 1963 the music critic of The Times named Lennon and McCartney the outstanding English composers of the year. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) won the Grammy for album of the year, and a dissenting review in The New York Times drew more letters, all disagreeing, than any music review the paper had published. The Byrds and Brian Wilson in the 1960s, and Radiohead, Elliott Smith and the Electric Light Orchestra later, have named what they took from the records, and Elvis Costello wrote that the Beatles made writing your own material “expected, rather than exceptional.” The band broke up after a year of disputes over management. McCartney announced the split in April 1970 and sued the other three that December, and the partnership was dissolved in 1975.

Formation

John Lennon formed a skiffle group in Liverpool in 1956 and named it the Quarrymen, after his school, Quarry Bank.¹ Skiffle was the British craze of those years: American folk and blues songs played on cheap guitars, a washboard and a bass made from a tea chest. Harrison said its leading figure, Lonnie Donegan, “was virtually the only guitar player that you could see” in Britain in the late 1950s.¹ On July 6, 1957, the Quarrymen played a church fete in Woolton, and McCartney, then fifteen, came to hear them with a school friend, Ivan Vaughan. Afterward McCartney played Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” for Lennon and knew all the words; Lennon remembered thinking, “He’s as good as me.”² The two remember the invitation to join differently. Lennon said he asked McCartney on the spot, and McCartney said a friend, Pete Shotton, brought the offer some days later.² In early 1958 McCartney brought in a younger school friend, George Harrison, who joined after playing Bill Justis’s instrumental “Raunchy” for Lennon on the top deck of a Liverpool bus.³

The group went through several names before it settled, in August 1960, on the Beatles. Lennon said he wanted a name like Buddy Holly’s backing group, the Crickets, that meant two things, and spelled it with “beat”; Harrison and McCartney credited the name to Lennon and his art-school friend Stuart Sutcliffe together.⁴ Sutcliffe had joined on bass in January 1960 with almost no experience. Harrison said they taught him a Chuck Berry song built on the twelve-bar blues, the standard three-chord pattern of rock & roll, and that “it didn’t matter at that time because he looked so cool.”⁴ Pete Best, whose mother ran the Casbah club in West Derby, joined on drums that August. Lennon said the band “had to have a drummer to get to Hamburg.”⁵

From August 17, 1960, the Beatles played the clubs of Hamburg’s red-light district for Bruno Koschmider, first at his Indra and then at his Kaiserkeller. Lennon put a night’s playing at eight hours, and Harrison said the contract at the Kaiserkeller had each of the two bands on the bill play six. Lennon said the waiters gave Preludin, a stimulant, to musicians falling over with tiredness.⁶ Lennon said the manager told them on their second night to “mach shau,” make a show, and that he answered by imitating Gene Vincent for the rest of the night, lying on the floor and throwing the microphone about.⁶ Harrison said the length of the sets made them learn whole albums: “all the Gene Vincent,” and everything by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly and Fats Domino.⁷ The first stay ended in late 1960, when Harrison, seventeen and under age for the clubs, was deported, and McCartney and Best were deported after a small fire in the cinema storeroom where the band slept.⁸

Back in Liverpool they began playing lunchtime sessions at the Cavern Club in February 1961. They returned to Hamburg that spring for three months at the Top Ten Club, where they backed the singer Tony Sheridan on a single for the producer Bert Kaempfert, “My Bonnie”, credited to Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers. Lennon called it “just Tony Sheridan singing, with us banging in the background.”⁹ Sutcliffe stayed in Hamburg to study painting, and McCartney took over the bass.⁹ Brian Epstein, who managed his family’s NEMS record shop, wrote that a customer asked him for “My Bonnie” on October 28, 1961. He went to see the group at the Cavern on November 9 and offered to manage them.¹⁰

Epstein got them an audition at Decca’s studios in London on January 1, 1962, where they recorded a set of fifteen songs, most of them covers of American records and three of them Lennon–McCartney originals. On January 24, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Best signed a five-year management contract with Epstein.¹⁰ Decca turned them down.¹¹ Epstein wrote in his 1964 memoir that Decca’s Dick Rowe told him “guitar groups are on the way out”; Rowe denied saying it for the rest of his life.¹¹ Sutcliffe died in Hamburg of a brain hemorrhage on April 10, 1962, aged 21, as the band was about to return there to open the new Star-Club.¹²

In May, George Martin, who ran EMI’s small Parlophone label and was best known for comedy records, offered them a contract, and on June 6 the band recorded its first session at EMI’s studios on Abbey Road.¹³ McCartney recalled that Martin then asked whether they would consider changing their drummer; Martin’s own account is that he wanted a session drummer for the first record.¹⁴ Epstein dismissed Best on August 16, 1962, and Ringo Starr, the drummer of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, whom they knew from Hamburg, played his first show as a Beatle two days later.¹⁴ Some of Best’s fans protested, and at the first Cavern show with Starr, Harrison was punched in the dark tunnel to the dressing room and came out with a black eye.¹⁵ Lennon said later, “We were cowards when we sacked him. We made Brian do it.”¹⁵

Career

1962–1963

Parlophone released “Love Me Do” on October 5, 1962, and it reached No. 17.¹⁶ The second single, “Please Please Me”, reached No. 1 on the charts printed by NME and Melody Maker in February 1963 and No. 2 on Record Retailer’s, the chart now counted as the official one.¹⁷ Martin recorded most of the debut album in one day, February 11, 1963, at Abbey Road: the band’s stage set of originals and covers, ten songs in about twelve hours.¹⁸ Please Please Me reached No. 1 that May and held it for thirty weeks, until With the Beatles replaced it.¹⁸ “From Me to You”, “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” each reached No. 1 in Britain that year.¹⁹

The national press began reporting the crowds that autumn. Mark Lewisohn, the band’s historian, dates “Beatlemania,” which he calls “a Fleet Street term coined at this time,” to their live television appearance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium on October 13, 1963, when fans besieged the theater and screamed inside it.²⁰ At the Royal Variety Performance on November 4, before the Queen Mother, Lennon asked the people in the cheaper seats to clap and the rest to “just rattle your jewellery.”²⁰ In late December the music critic of The Times, William Mann, wrote that “the outstanding English composers of 1963 must seem to have been John Lennon and Paul McCartney.” He analyzed their harmony in the vocabulary of classical music, and found their songs “distinctly indigenous in character” after decades in which England had taken its popular songs from America.²¹

1964–1966

Capitol, EMI’s American company, had declined the first four singles, which small American labels issued with little success.²² After Epstein secured prominent billing for the band on The Ed Sullivan Show, Capitol released “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on December 26, 1963, earlier than planned because radio play had created demand.²² It reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on February 1, 1964, and stayed there for seven weeks.²³ On February 9 the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show in New York. Nielsen reported 23,240,000 households watching, which Lewisohn gives as about 73 million people, the largest television audience on record at the time.²⁴ On the Hot 100 of April 4, 1964, the top five singles were all theirs, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Twist and Shout”, “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me,” and seven more of their records were further down the chart.²³ Capitol issued the music on its own albums: in Lewisohn’s count, eighteen American Beatles albums from 1964 to 1970 in place of the twelve in Britain.²⁵

A Hard Day’s Night, a film directed by Richard Lester from a script by Alun Owen, had its premiere in London on July 6, 1964, and when the band returned to Liverpool for the northern premiere four days later, some 200,000 people lined the route.²⁶ Its soundtrack album, A Hard Day’s Night, was the only one of their early albums made up entirely of Lennon–McCartney songs.²⁶ In June 1965 the four were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire, and some earlier holders of the honor objected. Lennon returned his medal in 1969.²⁷ On August 15, 1965, they played to 55,600 people at Shea Stadium in New York.²⁸ Lewisohn writes that by then the band was unhappy at performing “inaudible music to a sea of far-off Beatlemaniacs.”²⁸ Rubber Soul came out that December and topped the album charts in both countries.²⁹ Christgau, writing two years later in Esquire, judged it “about twice as good as anything they or anyone else (except maybe the Stones) had done previously.”³⁰

In March 1966 Lennon told Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard, in a long interview about his life, that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now.”³¹ In Manila that July the band missed a reception at the presidential palace. The next morning’s Manila Times ran the headline “Imelda Stood Up,” and the party was manhandled at the airport as it left.³² When the American teen magazine Datebook reprinted Cleave’s interview at the end of July, with a line from it on its cover, twenty-two radio stations banned the band’s records, led by one in Birmingham, Alabama, and Lennon apologized at a press conference in Chicago on August 11.³³ Revolver, recorded that spring, came out in August and topped both album charts. Melody Maker wrote that the Beatles had “broken the bounds of what we used to call pop,” and Christgau later called it “twice as good and four times as startling as Rubber Soul.”³⁴ The band, unhappy for a year at playing to crowds that could not hear it, played none of the Revolver songs on the American tour that followed. The tour ended at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966, with a thirty-three-minute show that closed with “Long Tall Sally”, and it was their last concert before a paying audience. As the plane left San Francisco, Harrison said, “Well, that’s it, I’m not a Beatle anymore.”³⁵

1967–1970

The first record after touring stopped was a single with two lead sides, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”, released in February 1967. It topped Melody Maker’s chart but stopped at No. 2 on Record Retailer’s, behind Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Release Me”. It was the first Beatles single since “Please Please Me” to miss No. 1 on that chart.³⁶ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in Britain at the end of May 1967. It entered the British chart at No. 8, then held No. 1 for twenty-three consecutive weeks, and held No. 1 in the United States for fifteen.³⁷ On June 25 the band played “All You Need Is Love” live from Abbey Road for Our World, an international television program carried in twenty-four countries.³⁸ Richard Goldstein called Sgt. Pepper “an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent” in The New York Times. Christgau reported that the paper received more letters about that review than about any music review in its history, “every last one in disagreement,” and himself called the album “a consolidation, more intricate than Revolver but not more substantial” while writing that it had exalted him.³⁹ It won the Grammy for album of the year in February 1968.³⁹

Brian Epstein died at his home in London on August 27, 1967, aged 32, of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, while the four were in Bangor, Wales, at a retreat with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.⁴⁰ Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970, “I knew that we were in trouble then.”⁴⁰ Four months later the BBC broadcast the band’s television film, Magical Mystery Tour, on December 26, in black and white, and the British press reviewed it badly.⁴¹ In February 1968 the four went to Rishikesh, in northern India, to study meditation with the Maharishi. They wrote many of the songs for their next album there. Starr left after about ten days, McCartney in March, and Lennon and Harrison left abruptly in April.⁴² That year they launched their own company, Apple Corps, whose record label, Apple, issued their records from “Hey Jude” (1968) on.⁴² Lennon, who had met the artist Yoko Ono in November 1966, became her partner in May 1968, and from then on she came to the band’s sessions. Lewisohn writes that the other three resented what Lennon called “johnandyoko,” a unit that extended even into the studio.⁴³

The double album The Beatles, known as the White Album, came out on November 22, 1968, and topped the album charts in both countries; William Mann in The Times called it “the most important musical event of the year.”⁴⁴ During its sessions Starr quit the group for about two weeks, and McCartney played drums on “Back in the U.S.S.R.” in his absence. Starr came back to find his drum kit covered in flowers.⁴⁴ In January 1969 the band began filming rehearsals at Twickenham Film Studios for a return to live performance. Harrison left on January 10 with the words “See you round the clubs,” and came back only when the others dropped the plan for a televised concert before an audience. The sessions moved to a basement studio at Apple’s offices at 3 Savile Row, with Billy Preston on keyboards.⁴⁵ On January 30 the band played for forty-two minutes on the roof of the building until the police came, and Lennon closed with “I hope we passed the audition.”⁴⁵

The question of management divided the band during 1969. Lennon, Harrison and Starr signed Allen Klein as their business manager in May; McCartney, who wanted his wife Linda’s father and brother, the lawyers Lee and John Eastman, refused to sign.⁴⁶ At a meeting at Apple on September 20, Lennon told McCartney, Starr and Klein that he was leaving, and agreed to keep it private while Klein renegotiated their record contract.⁴⁷ Abbey Road, recorded between February and August, came out six days later and topped the album charts in both countries. Reviews were mixed: Ed Ward in Rolling Stone called it “complicated instead of complex,” and Mann called its second side “marvellous.”⁴⁸ McCartney made the split public on April 10, 1970, in a set of questions and answers issued with his first solo album, McCartney, in which he said he did not know whether his break with the Beatles was temporary or permanent.⁴⁹ Let It Be, assembled from the January 1969 tapes and finished by Phil Spector, followed on May 8, 1970, and reached No. 1 in Britain.⁵⁰ On December 31, 1970, McCartney sued the other three in the High Court to dissolve the partnership, and he won after a hearing in early 1971.⁵¹ The partnership was formally dissolved on January 9, 1975.⁵¹

After 1970

All four went on to make solo records. Lennon was shot and killed outside his apartment building in New York on December 8, 1980.⁵² The three surviving Beatles completed two of Lennon’s home demos, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”, with the producer Jeff Lynne for The Beatles Anthology in 1995 and 1996, and the first Anthology album entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1.⁵³ Harrison died of cancer in Los Angeles on November 29, 2001, aged 58.⁵⁴ Audio software developed for Peter Jackson’s documentary The Beatles: Get Back (2021) separated Lennon’s voice from the piano on another demo, and the finished song, “Now and Then”, reached No. 1 in Britain in November 2023 and won the Grammy for best rock performance in 2025.⁵⁵

Music

The early records are two voices over rhythm guitar, bass and drums. Lennon and McCartney sing most of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in duet, often a fourth or fifth apart, intervals that sound bare and open next to the thirds and sixths of most pop harmony, and Lennon’s harmonica plays the instrumental hook of “Love Me Do.”⁵⁶ Lennon sings the lead on “Please Please Me” and “Help!”, McCartney on “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and the two share the lead on “She Loves You,” where a falsetto “whooo” opens each chorus.⁵⁷ Their harmony borrows chords from outside the key, a practice called modal interchange. The chord built on the lowered seventh note of the scale (in the key of G, an F major chord), which gives a major-key song a bluesy, unsettled color, appears in “P.S. I Love You” and “All My Loving”. Alan W. Pollack, whose analyses cover every song they released, wrote that the Beatles used it so often from 1964 that they are partly responsible for its becoming a cliché of late-1960s and early-1970s pop.⁵⁸ Pollack also counted the twenty-one songs Lennon and McCartney released through the end of 1963: all are about a romance seen from the boy’s side, and seventeen are sung directly to the girl.⁵⁹ The first album was recorded on a two-track machine with little room for overdubs; the band moved to four-track recording on October 17, 1963, with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”⁶⁰

Lennon and McCartney credited every song either of them wrote to both names, and each later named the main writer of each song, Lennon in 1980 and McCartney to Barry Miles in the 1990s.⁶¹ Harrison’s “Don’t Bother Me” was on With the Beatles in 1963; Revolver carried three of his songs, and Abbey Road two, “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun”.⁶¹

From 1964 Harrison played a Rickenbacker twelve-string electric guitar, and Pollack names “A Hard Day’s Night” as the song where its sound became theirs. The record opens on a single chord, with Harrison’s twelve-string prominent, which Pollack describes as close to D minor, F major and G major sounded together.⁶² “I Feel Fine” (1964) begins with guitar feedback, which Pollack describes as an isolated, ringing overtone an octave above the plucked note, and Starr plays it with an off-beat, slightly Latin feel.⁶³ From February 1965 the band recorded rhythm tracks first and built each song up in overdubs.⁶⁴ McCartney sings “Yesterday” alone, with his acoustic guitar and a string quartet of session players that Martin arranged.⁶⁵ Harrison plays sitar on “Norwegian Wood”, which he had first picked up on the set of Help! in 1965.⁶⁵ A fuzz-toned bass doubles the bass line an octave higher on “Think for Yourself”.⁶⁵ “Nowhere Man”, a portrait of a man without direction and an early example, in Pollack’s view, of folk rock, opens with three voices unaccompanied.⁶⁵ On “In My Life” Martin played the piano solo an octave lower at half speed, so that it plays back high and fast.⁶⁶ Pollack describes the words of “Help!” as “desperately anxious.”⁶⁷

From 1966 the records relied on techniques that could not be reproduced on stage. Pollack wrote that “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “A Day in the Life” and “I Am the Walrus” each do things with sound that cannot be done in real time without extensive editing.⁶⁸ On Revolver the engineer Geoff Emerick placed the microphones close to Starr’s drums and evened out their volume with a compressor, and EMI’s technical engineer Ken Townsend devised artificial double-tracking, which doubled a voice without a second performance and was used on almost every song on the album.⁶⁹ “Tomorrow Never Knows” stays on a drone on C, moving only briefly to B-flat, under tape loops (short lengths of tape spliced end to end and played over and over) and Lennon’s voice fed through a rotating Leslie loudspeaker.⁷⁰ No Beatle plays an instrument on “Eleanor Rigby”: there are only voices, McCartney’s lead with harmonies from Lennon and Harrison, and a double string quartet that Martin arranged and conducted.⁶⁹ Christgau wrote that the album had “a filter that made John Lennon sound like God singing through a foghorn.”⁷¹ “Strawberry Fields Forever” opens on a Mellotron, a keyboard that plays tape recordings of instruments, set to its flute sound. Two takes in different keys and tempos were joined at about one minute, with their tape speeds changed so they would match.⁷² The band spent fifty-five hours of studio time on the song.⁷² “Penny Lane” scores flutes, oboes and a high piccolo trumpet against the band.⁷³ On Sgt. Pepper’s “Within You Without You”, Harrison, the only Beatle on the track, sings and plays sitar with Indian musicians from the Asian Music Circle on dilruba, a bowed string instrument, and tabla, a pair of hand drums, with a Western string section. “A Day in the Life” has an orchestra climb from its lowest notes to its highest over twenty-four bars, following Martin’s written instructions, before a final E major chord struck on three pianos.⁷⁴ Pollack wrote that Sgt. Pepper has few love songs and many songs about society and experience.⁶⁸

The last records were made on eight-track machines, first at Trident Studios for “Hey Jude” on July 31, 1968, and at Abbey Road from that September.⁷⁵ “Hey Jude” is in two parts, a song and a long closing section in which one phrase repeats nineteen times.⁷⁶ Pollack described the White Album and the records after it as turning toward “straight-out rock songs, love ballads, and nostalgic evocations of earlier pop styles.”⁷⁷ “Get Back” is three chords in eight-bar sections, where the blues would use twelve, played with no overdubs.⁷⁸ Starr plays “Come Together” with almost no snare drum, and Harrison’s “Something” moves its bridge, the contrasting middle section, into a new key and sets his own voice in single, double and harmonized parts.⁷⁸ On Abbey Road Harrison played a Moog synthesizer, on “Because” and “Here Comes the Sun,” and the last eight songs on side two run together without a break, about sixteen minutes of music.⁷⁹ For Let It Be, Spector added an orchestra and choir to some of the January 1969 recordings, including McCartney’s “The Long and Winding Road”.⁸⁰

What it inherits and what it introduces

The Beatles learned rock & roll from American records. Lennon said it was Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” that got him into it.⁸¹ McCartney said he and Lennon began writing songs because of Buddy Holly, who wrote and played his own, and that Harrison took the stage name Carl Harrison on a 1960 tour after Carl Perkins, “our big idol.”⁸¹ Their first two albums include their versions of Black American records: “Anna”, first recorded by Arthur Alexander; “Boys” and “Baby It’s You”, by the Shirelles; “Chains”, by the Cookies, written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King; and three Motown records on With the Beatles, among them “You Really Got a Hold On Me”, first recorded by the Miracles.⁸² Starr said that when he joined, “we all had The Miracles,” and George Martin said the band “knew much more about Motown and black music than anybody else did.”⁸³ Mann described their songs as a “translation of African Blues or American western idioms” into “tough, sensitive Merseyside.”²¹ Lennon said he later went through a “Dylanesque period,” writing in Bob Dylan’s manner, and named “I Am the Walrus” as part of it.⁸⁴

Mann wrote that the virtue of their repertory was that, “apparently, they do it themselves; three of the four are composers.”²¹ Elvis Costello wrote in Rolling Stone in 2004 that the Beatles “made writing your own material expected, rather than exceptional,” and that they were “pretty much the first group to mess with the aural perspective of their recordings and have it be more than just a gimmick,” a license that ran “from Motown to Jimi Hendrix.”⁸⁵ Brian Wilson said the American edition of Rubber Soul, which he heard in December 1965, “felt like it all belonged together,” and that he made Pet Sounds in response.⁸⁶ Roger McGuinn of the Byrds said he took up the Rickenbacker twelve-string after seeing Harrison play one in the film A Hard Day’s Night.⁸⁷

Legacy

The Beatles had twenty No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1964 and 1970, the most of any act, and nineteen No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200.⁸⁸ The Official Charts Company counts eighteen British No. 1 singles and fifteen No. 1 albums.⁸⁹ In 2018 the Recording Industry Association of America counted 178 million certified album units for the band across forty-eight albums, the most of any group, and EMI has estimated their sales worldwide at more than a billion records.⁹⁰ The compilation 1 (2000) topped the Billboard 200 for eight weeks.⁹¹

Retrospective rankings have put them first. Rolling Stone placed them first in its list of the greatest artists of all time in 2004 and 2011, in the entry written by Costello, and Time included them in its hundred most important people of the century in 1998.⁹² The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the band in 1988, with Mick Jagger giving the induction.⁹³ Let It Be won the Academy Award for best original song score in 1971, and the band has won eight competitive Grammy Awards.⁹⁴

Musicians have traced the band’s influence in their own work and in others’. Costello wrote that he could hear the band “in the Prince album Around the World in a Day; in Ron Sexsmith’s tunes; in Harry Nilsson’s melodies.”⁸⁵ Thom Yorke of Radiohead said the band’s “working model” for “Paranoid Android” (1997), a song assembled from three sections, was “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, from the White Album.⁹⁵ Elliott Smith said the White Album “was pretty much my inspiration, that and AC/DC.”⁹⁶ Jeff Lynne said the cello parts of “I Am the Walrus” were “a big influence” on the Electric Light Orchestra.⁹⁷

Further reading

• Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1999) — a musicologist’s reading of every song from 1966 on
• Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (Chicago Review Press, 2007) — every recording in order, with its sessions and players
• Alan W. Pollack, “Notes on” series — an analysis of every song the band released

See also

• Merseybeat — the Liverpool scene the band came from
• The Rolling Stones — a British band of the same years
• British Invasion — the British bands’ arrival in the American charts from 1964
• The Kinks — another band of the British Invasion
• Psychedelia — the genre of several of their 1966–67 records
• The transatlantic feedback loop — American music taken to Britain and sent back
• The color line in pop — the covers of Black American records on their early albums
• The songwriter-performer divide — the expectation, which Costello credits to them, that bands write their own songs
• Pop as craft — the debate over professional songwriting that their own writing entered
• Authenticity and its discontents — the idea that real artists write their own songs