Original subtitles

- We want the Beatles.

We want the Beatles.

We want the Beatles.

We want the Beatles.

We want the Beatles.

We want the Beatles.

- When The Beatles burst

onto the world stage in 1963,

they transformed popular music overnight.

A commercial phenomenon like no other,

they paved the way for every artist

who followed in their wake.

- They were selling vast amounts of records,

a quarter of a million a week.

No one had ever done that before.

Even Elvis hadn't, Lonnie Donegan hadn't.

Every week selling a quarter of a million records.

- You had a revolution, just in terms of sales.

But in addition to that,

we wouldn't have had The Rolling Stones.

You wouldn't have The Byrds,

you wouldn't have had Dylan going electric.

You wouldn't have had The Doors,

and all those other bands we associate with the 60s.

The chances of them existing

without The Beatles are pretty slim.

- Yet the band's impact spread far beyond music.

As figureheads for a blooming youth culture,

their influence penetrated to the heart

of the post-war world.

- They were agents of change.

They were carrying everyone with them.

Everything felt modern, new, fresh, everywhere you looked.

The world started to look different.

- The colors started to really emerge,

the green shoots of a new culture.

- From the point of The Beatles' arrival,

they completely reinvented how culture works.

Suddenly, adults were growing their hair long.

Grown-up women were wearing mini-skirts.

Suddenly, it was young people who were determining everything.

That started with The Beatles.

- By the second half of the '60s,

the band transformed

into leaders of the emerging counterculture.

Bringing new social, sexual and artistic ideas

into the mainstream, through their peaceful revolution

they became the undisputed voice of a generation.

- The Beatles were the most commercial band on earth.

But they were also the most avant-garde and experimental.

That was their role.

Through their music, they opened up peoples' minds.

- They helped to move a lot of people

who might not otherwise have gone along

with the stuff that happened in '66, '67 and '68.

They were inspirational and influential in that way.

But as they became more involved in the counterculture

and more representative of it,

they became a political threat.

- This film traces The Beatles' path

through the most extraordinary decade of the 20th century.

It reveals the lasting impact

of four musicians from Liverpool,

who went from class warriors to cultural revolutionaries,

while providing the soundtrack for a generation.

- They were catalysts for a great many things.

They changed just about everything.

- Great Britain, 1962.

A small and once dominant Kingdom,

finally recovering from years of austerity

following the Second World War.

A nation of discipline and order,

of industrial cities and quiet village greens.

And although outwardly it appeared stuck in the past,

beneath the surface a fresh culture was developing

that would rapidly transform it.

At the close of the year the UK was hit

by some of the coldest weather it had ever suffered,

everyday life grinding to a halt

as snow covered the country.

Breaking through this bitter winter, on January 11th, 1963,

a record was issued that provided the first glimpse

of the brave new world that was to come.

Please Please Me, the second single

by Liverpudlian four-piece The Beatles,

quickly rose to number two on the British charts,

and its mainstream success announced the arrival

of a revolutionary force in both music and culture.

♪ You don't need me to show the way love

♪ Why do I always have to say love

- ♪ C'mon ♪ - ♪ C'mon ♪

- ♪ C'mon ♪ - ♪ C'mon ♪

- ♪ C'mon ♪ - ♪ C'mon ♪

♪ Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you... ♪

- Please Please Me was a kind of eruption.

They took the blunt force of 1950s rock and roll,

which was a blunt instrument,

there's no other way to describe it.

Musically and socially, it was a blunt instrument.

And they grafted on to that the harmonies

and the whole plaintive vocal quality of the girl groups

of the early 1960s.

Nobody had ever heard anything quite like this before.

This was a group that had two of the best singers

of their era in the same group,

and something like that

I don't think had really happened before.

The sound of John Lennon and Paul McCartney singing together

is one of the great sounds in music of the 20th century.

♪ Last night I said these words to my girl ♪

♪ I know you never even try, girl... ♪

- They were a shock to the system.

Love Me Do was the first single,

and it was a bit of a false start.

Please Please Me is when you had

the unison sound of the band.

They're singing, "Come on, come on."

There's this sense of anticipation

and a sense of excitement.

It was a fresh sound.

It sounds so traditional now.

But at the time,

the look and the sound was completely fresh.

It was positive, uplifting and modern.

- The Beatles-- John Lennon, Paul McCartney,

George Harrison and Ringo Starr--

provided a much needed shot in the arm

to Britain's pop scene.

Although American rock and roll had been enormously popular

in the mid 1950s,

its electrifying initial surge proved short-lived.

With its major stars either selling out

or disappearing from the scene,

the musicians that came in their wake were more wholesome

and less threatening.

British artists followed suit,

and the musical landscape in the UK

was dominated by talented imitators

and the teen idols of pop Svengali Larry Parnes.

With the support of their manager Brian Epstein

and producer George Martin,

The Beatles offered something very different.

Driven by the unique songwriting partnership

of John Lennon and Paul McCartney,

this band composed their own material.

- Most of conventional English show business,

as we think of it,

was really a pale reflection of American show business.

It had not always been the case.

But since the war, certainly it was.

You had singers like Matt Monro

who did an almost letter perfect imitation of Frank Sinatra.

By the same token,

you had the famous facile, fatuous English pop stars

of the period,

of whom Cliff Richard was by far the best known

and the most successful,

who was a kind of third-rate version of Elvis.

And not of the Elvis of Heartbreak Hotel

but of the Elvis of King Creole,

the Elvis of Elvis the movie star.

["Summer Holiday"]

♪ We're all going on a summer holiday ♪

♪ No more working for a week or two ♪

♪ Fun and laughter on our summer holiday ♪

♪ No more worries for me or you ♪

♪ For a week or two... ♪ ♪

- It was pretty professional.

Cliff Richard and The Shadows were good players.

It was a good act.

But it was family friendly.

And you had also characters like Larry Parnes,

with his stable of pretty boys who did what they were told,

who sung what they were told to sing,

and who had no particular creative input at all.

So when somebody like The Beatles comes along

and they're not only

playing their own instruments, singing beautifully,

they're also singing their own compositions,

this was incredibly rare at the time.

- The Beatles were keen from the start

to write their own material.

They wrote the songs to the audience,

to address the audience.

They knew that the audience was 80% teenage girls

and they wrote songs

that elicited the perfect response from them.

And after that, the deluge followed.

It sent the signal out to everybody

that you can all write your own song,

get a slice of the action.

Within a year or two, all bands were writing,

or having a crack at it.

- It wasn't only the extraordinary sound

of The Beatles or the unique talents of Lennon and McCartney

that were revolutionizing popular music.

As they came to dominate the charts in 1963,

their string of hit records

transformed the commercial fortunes

of the British record industry itself.

- As The Beatles became more popular,

and every record seemed to sell more and more,

you had a revolution in the British record industry,

just in terms of sales.

They'd never seen anything like this,

both in the amount of sales

and the how long The Beatles would hang around

in the charts, for months and months and months.

In addition to that,

there was the rolling impact of hit after hit after hit,

that never let the quality drop.

If anything, the quality increased,

from Please Please Me to From Me to You,

which was a little more downbeat but was no less wily.

And then between the eyes: She Loves You,

which explodes out of the radio to this day.

♪ She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪

♪ She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪

♪ She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪

♪ You think you've lost your love ♪

♪ Well, I saw her yesterday... ♪

- People like Cliff and Billy Fury and Elvis,

they were selling quite substantial amounts of

records per se, but by the beginning of 1963

when Please Please Me and From Me to You

and the Please Please Me album,

they were selling vast amounts of records.

- No one had seen anything like this

in the pop industry before.

This was suddenly a happening industry

that not only young people were taking notice of it,

but the bean counters too.

So you had everyone scouring Birmingham for The Moody Blues,

The Hollies in Manchester.

And Liverpool of course,

all the scouts were up there looking for the next Beatles.

Everyone wanted a slice of the action

because they'd revolutionized the music industry

in just a matter of months in 1963.

- But the group's impact

was not merely confined to the musical world.

They also both represented and inspired a seismic shift

at the very heart of British society.

How these four young working class Liverpudlians

managed to spearhead such a change

lie in The Beatles,' and the country's, past.

In the two centuries before the Second World War,

the United Kingdom had led the Industrial Revolution

and had ruled over the greatest Empire on earth.

One of the foundations behind this superpower

was its class system,

which both divided and ordered its citizens.

After emerging victorious from war in 1945,

the elite class in this system,

known as the Establishment, which included the monarchy,

the aristocracy, and the heads

of all the major institutions governing society,

immediately tried to reinforce their power,

and this chain of command would once again

shape life in Britain during the post-war years.

- Britain was a very class-ridden society.

We were a nation of subjects, not citizens.

And as long as you do have a royal family

and a set of lords and ladies,

the whole hierarchy of privilege,

then obviously someone's going to be at the bottom.

After the war,

the Establishment obviously tried to reassert itself.

So you still had the old Christian values, for instance.

Nothing happened on a Sunday.

Even children's swings in the parks

were chained up on Sundays.

The '60s really was the first time

that anyone kicked a hole in any of that

and started to challenge all

of these traditional assumptions.

Really, it was the same group of middle class people,

who assumed they had the right to tell everybody how to live,

were still very much in power.

- Yet Britain's power was waning

and its empire slowly crumbling.

Almost bankrupt as a result of its war effort,

the years of hardship that followed

saw the entire country suffer.

The North of England in particular struggled to recover,

and the once dominant port city of Liverpool,

heavily targeted by German air raids,

was beset by widespread damage and disappearing industry.

- During the 19th century,

the North developed this proud sense of itself.

The port of Liverpool was the greatest port in the world

because England was the greatest commercial nation

in the world and most things came in and out there.

But over the course of the 20th century,

England went through a phenomenon that

is now very familiar

to Americans of the late 20th century,

which is the decline of industrialization,

the decline of manufacturing.

By the 1940s, it was very clear

that Liverpool was in decline.

As a result, The Beatles' generation grew up in this place

that was filled with the emblems of imperial might

but which was becoming a very dire place to live

in many ways.

- Everywhere there was a debris.

The streets were full of bombed buildings.

All the kids used to play

in the buildings and deserted places.

The debris was still going 20 or 30 years later.

There was no money about, and it was very hard.

What did young people have in Liverpool to look forward to?

Everything was closing down.

All the factories were closing down.

It was pretty tough times in Liverpool in those days.

- And it was within this stark landscape

that The Beatles grew up.

The band's founder and eldest member, John Lennon,

was the product of a broken home

and was raised by his aunt and uncle

in a fairly affluent area of the city.

His future bandmates,

Paul McCartney and George Harrison, however,

both came from working class neighborhoods.

Despite the dereliction surrounding them

and the hard times in which they were raised,

the future prospects of all three were given a boost

by a new educational initiative

that saw the brightest children enrolled in grammar schools,

whatever their financial background.

- John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison

took an examination when they were 11 years old

that essentially certified them as clever.

And as a result of passing what was called the 11+ exam,

that meant they were eligible to go to grammar schools.

Grammar schools were designed to educate children

in order to go on to some form of higher education.

What this meant was that at a relatively early age,

at the age of 11,

particularly Paul McCartney and George Harrison,

whose origins were truly working class.

John Lennon was a bit more complicated.

John was a little betwixt and between.

But in the case of both Paul McCartney and George Harrison,

at the age of 11, they were somewhat isolated

from the world of the housing estates

that they had grown up on.

Every day they took the bus into the center of Liverpool

to go to a place called the Liverpool Institute

and they were essentially marked

and educated from the age of 11

to transcend their working class origins.

- With far better schooling than their parents,

these future Beatles were a new breed,

raised within the proud Liverpudlian working class,

yet unfazed by the educated elites supposedly above them.

And with the coming of rock and roll in 1956,

a musical form exploded that spoke directly to their youth

and their sense of difference.

It was the following year

that John Lennon met Paul McCartney

and invited him to join his band The Quarrymen,

with George Harrison joining shortly thereafter.

All around them in Liverpool

a new phenomenon was finding its own rebellious voice:

the teenagers had arrived.

- The '50s became the era

when teenagers really came into their own.

We were together in our love of the music.

Up until that time a young lad would be taken to the pub

for his first pint, when he turned of age, by his dad.

He'd dress like his dad.

He'd go into the union of his dad

and he'd go in the same work as his dad.

With the girls, she was in the kitchen

learning how to make the breakfast,

do the cleaning, all the rest of it.

But suddenly the youngsters were now earning money

and they wanted to spend it their way

and do their things and not be told what to do.

- A generation gap was opening up

and this would dominate cultural life in Britain

across the next decade.

And while rock and roll resonated

with young working class Britons,

other American influences,

from the Beat poets to jazz and blues,

were embraced by middle class teenagers.

If the future Beatles were at heart rock and roll rebels,

none of them more embodied this than John Lennon.

But having failed his exams in 1957,

he found a place at the Liverpool College of Art,

where he was thrown into an unfamiliar,

Bohemian student culture.

Although this would prove vital in expanding his talents,

here Lennon was an outsider.

- I first met John Lennon at the College of Art.

I was sitting down in the canteen.

Suddenly I noticed this guy walk past.

And I thought, what's he dressed up like?

He was dressed almost like a teddy boy,

in a completely unconventional type of dress

compared to all the other students.

I looked round and everyone was wearing duffle coats

and turtleneck sweaters.

I thought, oh, they're all wearing the same,

they're all conventional.

He's the rebel. He's the one who's different.

I must get to know him.

- If you were in art school in the 1950s

you would have been exposed

to the intellectual radicalism and rebellion of figures

like Jack Kerouac and the Beat generation

who were anti-established religion, pro self-expression

anti any kind of Establishment repression.

And the angry young men of theater,

John Osborne, Arnold Wesker--

these guys were angry, but they were clever.

They found a way of directing their anger,

which may well have been a personal angst,

but when it's directed to the outside world

it can create a great articulate voice of a generation,

if you like.

- Nine hundred and fifty-four...

nine hundred and fifty-bloody-five,

I could get through in half the time if I went like a bull,

but they'd only slash me wages, so they can get stuffed.

Don't let the bastards grind you down,

that's one thing I've learned.

- This sort of influence would have been very appealing

to someone like John Lennon

who was himself an angry young man,

for all kinds of personal reasons.

But if you could be an angry young man

and thoughtful with it, then that's very appealing.

- By the summer of 1960,

the school days of John Lennon,

Paul McCartney and George Harrison were over.

Yet they were quickly thrust

into an education of another kind.

In August, the band, now calling itself The Beatles,

headed for a season of shows

in the vibrant German city Hamburg,

and over the following year

it was here that they earned their stripes

as a rock and roll band.

Upon their return to Liverpool in 1961,

they quickly rose to the very top of the city's music scene.

Yet they were isolated in the North,

and the rest of the country paid little attention.

- I started writing to papers like The Daily Mail

saying what is happening in Liverpool

is like New Orleans at the turn of the century,

but with rock and roll instead of jazz.

Of course, no one was interested.

So I decided to do it myself and created Mersey Beat

and of course my friends,

John and the group he formed, The Beatles,

were the main people I wrote about.

- With a teenage audience hungry for information

about this new rock and roll scene,

Bill Harry's Mersey Beat music paper proved a huge success

in the North of England.

Celebrating The Beatles in almost every issue,

it brought them to the attention of one of its contributors,

local businessman Brian Epstein.

The manager of a Liverpool music store,

through Bill Harry, Epstein arranged to see the band play

at the city's legendary Cavern Club

and was blown away by their performance.

He immediately offered to manage the band

and by January 1962, a contract was signed.

Wary of the controlling approach of managers like Larry Parnes,

Epstein was still conscious of the unwritten rules

of the British entertainment industry.

If The Beatles were going to change the world,

they'd first have to change their look.

- What I think he had was the instinct

to realize the general overall pattern

of how things worked in this country.

They were the savage young Beatles

dressed in black leather

and playing rock and roll to prostitutes,

gangsters and all the rest of it in Hamburg,

taking drugs and all the rest of it.

They were the savage young Beatles.

They would never have been accepted

by the established media.

- And The Beatles' breakthrough in early 1963

confirmed that Epstein's instincts were spot on.

He had successfully smuggled a unique band of rebels

into the heart of the mainstream.

Yet unlike the controlling managers

that dominated the British entertainment world,

he then simply set them loose.

From the moment they soared to the top

of the British charts,

the press, radio interviewers and television presenters

came face to face with The Beatles,

and these quick-witted, confident

and very modern young men

chose to play the game by their own rules.

- In the beginning, The Beatles' behavior with the press

was the most revolutionary thing about it.

Nobody of their age group,

and to a certain extent, of their background,

had ever behaved this way with reporters before.

- Do you know, you look like Matt Monro?

- Give us "Russia with Love."

- Thanks, boys.

- The Beatles were just audacious.

When they were being interviewed,

they kind of turned the tables.

When Adam Faith or someone like that was interviewed before,

it was very much a master and servant kind of thing.

- Cliff, what sort of tour did you have?

- I can honestly say it's been

probably the most pleasurable one we've had for some time,

mainly because, not just the audiences,

but because we've had a few hours off,

we've been swimming and sunbathing.

- The Beatles just ripped into that,

and almost ridiculed the whole thing,

turned the whole thing into a Marx Brothers farce,

which was fantastic.

- I hear the four of you are going to be millionaires

by the end of the year. - Oh, that's nice.

- Have you got time to actually spend this money?

- What money? He said.

- Doesn't he give any to you? - No.

- Have you seen that car of his?

- It was very, very close to the way groups

of male adolescents interacted with one another

as a matter of course.

This is what teenage boys do.

They try to top one another.

They try to cut one another down, all this sort of thing.

The Beatles simply had the nerve to take this thing

and to perform it in front of microphones and cameras.

- John, we hear there's a rumor

in The News of The Beatles paper

that you might be leaving the group.

- Rubbish, I'm contracted.

I've been trying to get out for years.

- You've been writing some poetry.

- What paper?

- A paper called The News of The Beatles.

- Never heard of it. - Do you want to see it?

- No. - Must be American.

- Part of their success came from the fact

that they were not plastic.

They were authentic.

They came out of a fairly tough city.

They were just being themselves and that was astonishing.

That was new to actually be yourself, it was new.

- By presenting themselves genuinely,

The Beatles managed to highlight the mannered,

stilted exterior of British cultural life

at a time when it was already showing signs of weakness.

Polite society's attitude to all forms of behavior,

in particular sex,

had been prudish and stuffy for centuries,

but by the early 1960s things were changing.

At the beginning of the decade

the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover

was successfully published.

Withheld from the general public since the late 1920s,

this erotic tale of love across the class divide

became a phenomenon upon its release,

quickly selling over three million copies.

At the same time, a scandal erupted

at the very heart of the British Establishment,

with the exposure of an illicit affair

between politician John Profumo and a 19-year-old model.

The uptight sexual attitudes of the British

were being confronted in public.

And then Beatlemania happened.

By the summer of 1963, the band's overwhelming effect

on teenage girls was becoming a nationwide epidemic.

Their critics warned that the Liverpudlians

had unleashed a wave of sexual frenzy

in their female audience.

Yet the liberation that The Beatles offered these girls

was more complicated than it first appeared.

- What everybody wanted to think,

and also didn't want to think,

was this was somehow all about eroticism,

this was all about sex,

and that what was going on here

was that these young women were having something

that looked like it simulated a sexual experience

in response to the sight and sound of The Beatles.

Therefore, it was always talked and written about

in the Freudian terms of hysteria,

which of course is a sexually charged term also.

Were these girls orgasmic? Was this orgasmic?

That's not what was going on.

- With rock and roll in the 1950s,

that was a catalyst for a lot of young men

finding a reason to be something other than a version

of their dad when they became adolescents.

It wasn't necessarily fabulously articulate

to dress as a teddy boy and be a bit rowdy on the street,

but at least it was finding an identity.

I think for a young female,

it wasn't quite as straightforward.

Something like Beatlemania,

the screaming that surrounded The Beatles,

it's quite tempting to interpret it

as a sort of howl of frustration

as they try and find their own identity,

and it's as inarticulate, in a way,

as teddy boys rampaging in cinemas.

- Do you deliberately try

and create this screaming reaction?

- No, we just arrive at the theater,

and they're always there waiting.

Whenever we're doing a show, the police always come and say,

"Don't look out the window, 'cause you excite them."

- These girls were controlling public space,

and nobody could do anything about it.

It's a perfect example of what we would call bad behavior.

Screaming, yelling, weeping in public.

This is bad behavior in one way or another.

Yet, it was sanctioned, not by the authorities,

but by The Beatles themselves.

- The Beatles phenomenon was unstoppable.

At the end of August, the single She Loves You

became the fastest selling record

that had ever been released in the UK.

In less than a year, the band's success outstripped

that of any artist who had preceded them.

And the final stage in their conquest of Britain

came on November 4th, 1963,

when for the first time The Beatles came face to face

with the highest order of the Establishment,

the royal family.

The occasion unleashed the rock and roll rebel

in John Lennon, who saw in the night's performance

an opportunity too good to pass up.

- John, In this Royal Variety Show,

when you're appearing before royalty,

your language has got to be pretty good, obviously.

This thing about Ted Heath saying

that he couldn't distinguish--

- I can't understand that. - The Queen's English...

- I can't understand Teddy saying that at all, really.

I'm not going to vote for Ted.

- But you're not going

to change your act, just for the--

- Ah no, like, we'll keep the same kind of thing, won't we?

- Oh aye, yes. - Yeah, that's right.

- Lennon always had an ambivalent relationship with how

the Entertainment Establishment were cozying up to The Beatles.

On the one hand,

the professional in him loved the fact

that they were being fantastically successful.

But the rebel in him found it all hard to take.

So on the occasion of the Royal Command Performance,

he teased Brian Epstein by suggesting

that he was going to go up and swear in front of the Queen.

But in the end, his professionalism won out.

He managed to create a little bit of subversion,

but it was very carefully thought through.

- Thank you.

For our last number, I'd like to ask your help.

Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands?

And the rest of you, if you just rattle your jewelry.

- And this is like a moment of insurrection, it felt like.

But the thing is it wasn't quite as radical perhaps

because you look at Lennon's face after he says it

and he looks as if he's just admitted to his mum

that he's messed himself, or something like that!

It was something really humble pie.

He felt quite sheepish.

But no one else but John Lennon would come out

and even have the gall to say that.

What may have seemed a kind of revolutionary,

insurrectionary moment by saying, rattle your jewelry,

in a really class driven moment,

was actually punctured by this sense

that The Beatles were nice boys

and they can get away with anything.

- With the youth of Britain in their thrall,

The Beatles headed out to new territories,

traveling to Scandinavia at the close of the year

and then on to France.

The domestic pop scene that they left behind

had been transformed by their success,

and from Liverpudlian acts like Gerry and the Pacemakers

to London's The Rolling Stones,

new groups were emerging on an almost weekly basis

to battle it out in the clubs and on the charts.

The Beatles were moving on, however,

with manager Brian Epstein's sights set firmly

on the largest territory of all: America.

- Looking forward to this American trip,

have you had any reaction over there?

Have you got any fan clubs going?

- There's one supposedly started.

They're getting quite a good response.

12,000 letters a day.

- But The Beatle movement's going over there?

- Yeah, it can even be a Beatle booster, folks.

- I must tell you, by the way, that Detroit University

have got a Stamp out The Beatles movement.

- Oh yeah? - Ah, no.

- We're going to stamp out Detroit.

- They think your haircuts are un-American.

- Well, that's very observant of them

because we aren't American actually.

- There was always a thing of, what happens next?

Is The Beatles' bubble is going to burst?

But it never did.

It just kept going on.

- If Britain was suffering

a particularly harsh winter when The Beatles

had first set the charts alight in early 1963,

when their single I Want to Hold Your Hand

reached America the following year,

it entered a nation grappling with far greater misfortunes.

Having emerged from the Second World War

as one of the world's two superpowers,

the following decade had been dominated

by the country's hostile relationship

with the Soviet Union

and the threat of a full blown nuclear war.

But Americans themselves were enjoying

the fruits of a flourishing economy,

a strong consumer culture had developed

and domestic confidence was running high.

In 1960, President John F. Kennedy came to office,

a young, charismatic politician

who embodied this new confidence

and who promised a bright and optimistic future.

- My fellow citizens of the world,

ask not what America will do for you,

but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

- Three years later, in November 1963,

his assassination shook the country to its core.

- There was this injection of energy into American life

that he represented.

He was young, he was handsome.

It represented such a marked change from Dwight Eisenhower.

Eisenhower was a carry-over from World War II.

Obviously, he was a war hero.

He was an extension of that generation into modern America.

But John Kennedy was modern America.

All of the optimism and youthfulness.

The baby boom was going on.

You know, it was kind of epitomized by John Kennedy.

And the Kennedy assassination just,

it just ended that.

The Beatles represented, also, youth,

just as John Kennedy did, and wit and intelligence.

Certainly, for young people

it turned things around immediately.

The Beatles just lit America up.

- I'm sure it could have been something else.

I'm sure that some other joyful manifestation of something

could have occurred, but what occurred was a song.

And it's really important to realize

in Britain, The Beatles' personalities,

their repartee, their whole public performance

was a critical part of the way they came to the attention

of the British public.

In America, it was a song.

♪ Oh yeah I tell you somethin'

♪ I think you'll understand

♪ When I say that somethin'

♪ I want to hold your hand ♪

- It was the perfect vehicle

to come into this traumatized national atmosphere.

What is the dominant quality of the sound

of John Lennon and Paul McCartney signing together?

Joy, joy in performance,

joy in listening to one another's voices,

joy in whatever kind of reinforcement is going on here.

That's painting with really broad strokes.

There's nothing subtle about that.

- There is no question The Beatles

changed everything immediately.

I Want to Hold Your Hand made a gigantic impact.

Then of course the flood gates opened,

not only with one great Beatles' song after another,

but the British Invasion.

I mean, The Beatles just knocked the door down.

- What The Beatles had done to Britain

they were now doing to America.

Released at the close of 1963, within two months

I Want to Hold Your Hand had sold more than a million copies

and became the band's first number one single in the US.

A week after they topped the charts,

John, Paul, George and Ringo crossed the Atlantic

and arrived in New York City

to greet a new set of screaming teenage fans.

They were also met by members of the press

keen to understand this foreign phenomenon,

and the group introduced them

to their unique brand of informal humor,

as rare in America as it had been in Britain.

- There's no question

that the way they dealt with the press was original.

It was quite clear that they were not like anything else.

How smart they really were, how funny they were!

John and Paul in particular

were extremely intelligent, articulate, original people.

And George was also a very droll guy.

And Ringo was sort of a natural clown.

Who was just that quick, that smart,

who was a pop star?

I must be forgetting somebody,

but damned if I can think of who it would be.

- Do you think of your records as funny records or as music?

- No, we think that it's rather peculiar.

- Do you feel they're musical?

- Obviously they're musical, because it's music, isn't it?

Instruments make music.

It's a record. - It's musical.

You know: ♪ Bom ♪ It's music, isn't it?

- ♪ Bom ♪ That's music too.

- He's good. He knows music.

- All right, but what do you call it?

Do you call it rock and roll?

- We try not to define it.

We've got so many wrong classifications of it.

It's no use, we just call it music.

Even if you don't.

- With a question mark? - Pardon?

- With a question mark? - No.

With an exclamation mark.

- The underlying message of The Beatles' wit

in their press conferences was about a youth movement

that wasn't going to be determined by old people.

From the point of The Beatles' arrival,

they completely reinvented how culture works.

Before that everything-- fashion, movies, music--

it all was top down.

It all was what grown-ups liked,

and then it filtered down to the kids.

After a year or two, suddenly it was young people

who were determining everything.

That started with The Beatles.

- Having broken all previous sales records

in Britain the year beforehand,

by April 1964, the band made Billboard Hot 100 history

by becoming the only act ever

to occupy the first five positions on the chart.

The Four Mop-Tops were now revolutionizing popular music

in America too,

and Beatlemania spread like wildfire throughout the country.

And then, in July,

following the time-honored career trajectory

of all post-war popular entertainers,

the band starred in their first full-length feature film.

Yet A Hard Day's Night was, unsurprisingly,

unlike anything that had preceded it.

♪ It's been a hard day's night

♪ And I been working like a dog

♪ It's been a hard day's night... ♪

- Music movies before A Hard Day's Night

were profit-making ventures

intended exclusively for the teen audience

of whatever artist happened to be in now.

A Hard Day's Night just flipped that.

They took what was a toss-off form, the rock movie,

and made it something great.

- Directed by American Richard Lester,

the film created an entirely new language

for rock and roll cinema.

Previously, musicians had all made their transition

to the big screen playing fictional characters

created by screenwriters.

In A Hard Day's Night, however,

The Beatles played themselves in a comedy

inspired by their own experiences of fame.

It was both a commercial and a critical phenomenon.

- They're playing themselves in a fictional film.

That didn't happen.

So much of what happened in the early career of The Beatles

hadn't really happened before.

They were breaking through on so many different levels.

- Tell me, how did you find America?

- Turn left at Greenland.

- Has success changed your life? - Yes.

- I'd like to keep Britain tidy.

- Are you a mod or a rocker?

- No, I'm a mocker.

- Have you any hobbies?

- As I see it, it's really A Hard Day's Night

that establishes them as something completely new

and interesting beyond your wildest imaginings.

- I don't snore. - You do, repeatedly.

- Do I snore, John?

- Yeah, you're a window rattler, son.

- That's just your opinion. Do I snore, Paul?

- With a trombone hooter like yours

it would be unnatural if you didn't.

- No, Paulie, don't mock the afflicted.

- Ah, come off it. It's only a joke.

- It may be a joke, but it's his nose.

He can't help having a hideous great hooter,

and a poor little head

trembling under the weight of it.

- This was not the rock and roll movie

that you were expecting to see, not at all.

And although their wit,

it had been clear they were always funny

on the microphone, its irreverence

and its irreverence about themselves

was just completely unprecedented.

And, of course, it just made them seem even more godlike.

- And while The Beatles

embarked on a substantial US tour in the summer of '64,

back in Britain the whole country

was evolving in their wake.

Following the sex scandals of the previous year,

the nation had turned against the Establishment

and voted in the Labor government

of new Prime Minister Harold Wilson,

a man who seemed to represent the voice

of a younger, more progressive United Kingdom.

- Harold Wilson actually became leader of the Labor party

around the same time that The Beatles were having

the first stirrings of huge success.

He was northern. Let's not forget that.

So this was again part of this big northern powerhouse.

You had The Beatles on the popular culture sense,

and then you had Harold Wilson who was reflecting modernity

in the political sense.

We're thrusting into a new world.

We were behind Europe in the '50s.

The Tories had let us down.

He wanted to: Let's get modern.

Like the Italians, like the French, like the Germans,

let's get working

and let's make everyone enjoy the fruits of the success.

- And central to this new,

progressive Britain was its youth.

The staggering international success

of the homegrown pop scene

had injected the younger generation with confidence,

and, boosted by the country's growing prosperity,

a new consumer culture emerged.

Fresh from the breeding grounds of the art colleges,

the modern ideas

of Britain's budding designers were unleashed.

This was nowhere more apparent than in fashion,

and its nerve center in London's bustling Carnaby Street.

- This was the first time that young people had enough money

to buy records, to buy clothes, to have their hair cut.

Out of that almost immediately came a separate youth market.

Carnaby Street thrived.

Up until that point, when a girl left school,

she immediately began dressing like her mother.

whereas someone like Mary Quant

made dresses you could run in,

you could dance in and do stuff that young people do.

And, of course, that transformed the whole face

of British fashion.

- Everything felt modern, new, fresh.

Everywhere you looked the world started to look different.

The black and white of the early Beatles and pre-Beatles,

even with The Beatles all in black and white,

even A Hard Day's Night was in black and white.

Within a year, the colors started to really emerge,

the green shoots of a new culture.

- Although they had played the central role

in cultivating this new cultural landscape,

by late 1964, The Beatles themselves were growing weary

of their Eight Days a Week fame.

In an attempt to escape from Beatlemania,

both John Lennon and George Harrison

had moved to rural Surrey,

30 miles from the center of London,

and Ringo Starr would join them there the following year.

In December, Beatles For Sale,

the band's fourth studio album, was released,

and it clearly showed signs of fatigue.

- You only have to look at the cover.

These are young men exhausted really

by a couple of years of Beatlemania.

It was just obvious that they were becoming worn out,

and that the incredible appeal of early fame,

which they just rode that like a wonderful wave,

and you can see and feel the joy

in the records and the interviews.

By Beatles for Sale, it's losing its luster quite quickly.

- Yet the onward march of youth culture

would soon revive the band.

While the kaleidoscopic colors of Carnaby Street

were in full bloom,

a more experimental subculture was developing

in West London, the leaders of which

would soon cross paths with The Beatles.

Inspired by avant-garde literature, art and music,

this loose group of artists and artisans

lacked a sense of community.

In June 1965, however, Barry Miles, the manager

of renowned independent bookshop Better Books,

arranged a momentous poetry event at London's Albert Hall,

featuring Allen Ginsberg

and other leading American Beat writers.

It was of huge significance,

uniting the various creative clans

of an emerging British counterculture.

- The big poetry reading at the Albert Hall in '65

and was I think the first time a constituency

was seen in London.

Up until that point the actors and the poets

and the filmmakers and the people who ran boutiques,

none of them knew each other.

At this event,

which was basically a Beat generation reading

of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso,

all of these people came together

into the Albert Hall, 7,000 people.

The whole thing was a giant party,

really like the first mass networking session, I suppose.

- At this pivotal event

that he had helped organize,

Miles met John Dunbar, an artist friendly

with both Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso

and who had recently married young singer Marianne Faithful.

Together, they planned a new center

for underground activities, the Indica Bookshop and Gallery,

and this would bring Miles directly

into The Beatles' world.

- We went along to the Albert Hall

and a friend called Paolo Leone went,

"Oh, you should meet this guy."

Miles worked at Better Books at that point.

So we got chatting.

I don't know how many people it holds, the Albert Hall,

couple of thousand, 5,000, I don't know.

Anyway, we kind of thought,

everybody's paid a quid to see this,

so maybe we could do a shop.

- We decided to combine forces

and start a bookshop art gallery combined.

His best friend was a guy called Peter Asher

who at that point was in Peter and Gordon,

a little rock and folk duo

who had number one hits, in fact,

in Britain and America and Japan.

And so Peter had some money, so naturally we looked to Peter

to finance this venture.

Consequently, we started a company

called Miles, Asher and Dunbar, MAD.

I got to know Peter, of course, through this.

He was living at home with his parents.

Also living at home was his sister Jane Asher.

Jane was a TV personality.

She interviewed people.

She was a child star in films and did a lot on the radio.

Also living there was Jane Asher's boyfriend

who was Paul McCartney,

who was living on the top floor

in a little attic room next to Peter's room.

So there was this extraordinary household

that I got introduced to.

And when I was setting up the bookshop,

we had all the books delivered to the basement

because we hadn't found any premises yet.

Obviously, through that I got to know Paul as well.

He would come in late at night, browse through the books

and just leave me a note saying what he'd taken.

So he was my first customer, in fact, in the bookshop.

When we did find some premises,

he helped put up the shelves and paint the walls,

so he was very, very involved with the whole project.

It was wonderful to get to know him.

- While his bandmates had fled London

in favor of the quiet suburban life,

through his contact with the progressive art world,

Paul McCartney soon became the most cultured of The Beatles.

Where John Lennon had been married for years

and was raising a young son,

George Harrison had moved in with girlfriend Patti Boyd

and Ringo Starr was a newlywed,

McCartney was actively pursuing fresh sounds

and fresh concepts, with Miles as his avant-garde guide.

- In his own words,

he used to go round London with his antenna out.

One day he would go to see a John Cage concert

or Luciano Berio or some electronic music.

Then the next day he would go to see Tessie O'Shea

at the Talk of the Town,

or some torch singer down at The Blue Angel.

It was all being sucked in.

- McCartney was very much the culturally aware Beatle

about town, while the others

went into a slightly cozier existence

in the stockbroker belt.

He was still curious,

he was still hungry for any stimulation.

It's around this time, 1965, 1966,

that McCartney really begins to drive The Beatles.

He hung around in London, being stimulated,

and bringing all of that back to The Beatles' table

and giving them, continuing to give them an artistic edge.

- That artistic edge would prove unmistakable

when The Beatles headed to the studio in mid-1965

to record the album Rubber Soul.

Across the previous year,

the wave of bands inspired by The Beatles' example

had not only begun to catch up with the Liverpudlians,

but in some cases threatened to overtake them.

Following Lennon and McCartney's lead,

the Rolling Stones had managed to break America

and had begun to write their own hits.

Folk icon Bob Dylan had gone electric

and transformed into the preeminent poet of rock,

and new bands were emerging, from The Who to The Byrds,

introducing fresh sounds and perspectives.

Yet The Beatles were ready to pave the way once again.

In pursuit of total creative control,

with Rubber Soul, producer George Martin booked the band

into Abbey Road Studios for an entire month,

turning conventional recording rules on their head.

- Before Rubber Soul, a professional recording day

was overseen by recording engineers in white coats.

And there was three hours in the morning, a break for lunch,

and three hours in the afternoon.

And that was it.

That was your recording day.

When Rubber Soul came along, they had enough clout to say,

we want a bit more flexibility than that.

We might want to stay on and record into the night.

- They invented the idea of treating a record album

as if it were a work of art.

It takes time to do anything that's worthwhile.

So you had this new idea,

the idea of the recording studio

as compositional laboratory.

This was this incredible real revolution,

not just how to make records, but how to make music.

["In My Life" by The Beatles]

♪ There are places I remember... ♪

- Rubber Soul looks like the moment when pop music

could become popular art.

The whole album had a sense of being an artistic statement.

Brian Wilson himself of The Beach Boys said,

when I heard Rubber Soul

I knew that's how good pop records could be.

They could be a whole artistic world.

That's how good Rubber Soul was.

♪ Is there anybody going to listen to my story

♪ All about the girl who came to stay

♪ She's the kind of girl

♪ You want so much it makes you sorry

♪ Still you don't regret a single day

♪ Ah, girl

♪ Girl, girl ... ♪

- John Lennon is suddenly writing lyrics like:

"Was she told when she was young

"that pain would lead to pleasure?

"Did she understand it when they said

"that a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure?

Will she still believe it when he's dead?"

And that's in a song called Girl.

Those aren't pop song lyrics.

That gave Rubber Soul just a very different feel.

["The Word" by The Beatles]

♪ Say the word and you'll be free

♪ Say the word and be like me

♪ Say the word I'm thinking of

♪ Have you heard the word is love...♪

- You could hear that they were actually writing songs

as artists, not just as pop performers.

So you had songs like The Word,

which is an extraordinary song for 1965.

"Say the word and that word is love."

This is two years before the Summer of Love.

The despair of Beatles for Sale,

and there they are now reaching out

for something that they've picked up on something else.

- And just as Rubber Soul

reestablished the band's musical superiority,

the four young Northern radicals were officially recognized

by the British Establishment.

Having already received the highest accolades

from the entertainment world, in October 1965

they were invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen.

Here they would be anointed as members

of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, or MBEs.

- This has been one of the talents of the Establishment

for a very long time.

In fact, this is what the MBEs and knighthoods

and all sorts of things like that were all about.

At a certain point,

renegades need to be brought into the fold.

But it's at that very moment that they now,

'cause they were always importing musical influences,

but they also become a conduit for imported American influences

in these other fields that they're getting interested in.

Miles is turning them onto Ginsberg's poetry.

Robert Fraser is turning them

onto American pop artists, things like this.

They've become citizens of the world.

So it's perfectly appropriate that at that very moment

the British Establishment should say,

"Time for you to come to Buckingham Palace

and be certified as members of the British Empire."

- John, had you met the Queen before?

- No, first time.

- What did she think of you in the flesh?

Did she tell you?

- No, she's not going to say either way.

She seemed pleasant enough to us.

Made us relaxed.

- Now you've got this,

do you feel that you're becoming part of the Establishment,

as it's so called?

- No, don't feel any different.

I still feel just like before.

I feel exactly the same. - You feel exactly the same.

- It was a recognition that the pop world had come of age.

They were the aristocracy of the pop world,

of pop culture, of working class culture.

So it was inevitable in a way that they would be rewarded

in the spirit of the new democracy.

But also it closed a chapter, because from then on

they went off and did it their way

which wasn't the Establishment's way.

In fact, it was the beginning of a period

of great antagonism with the Establishment and pop culture,

and The Beatles, as usual,

were pretty much at the center of that.

- The Beatles' position at the center

of these new developments in youth culture

was crucial to their evolution over the next two years.

With McCartney now closely affiliated

with key players in London's underground artistic scene,

and with similar movements in both New York and Los Angeles

influencing American musicians,

the stage was now set for more radical ideas

to enter the mainstream.

And as these were developing,

a new drug and a new figurehead were gaining prominence

on both sides of the Atlantic.

- The message is very simple.

Six words.

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

- Psychologist Timothy Leary had emerged

in the US as a prominent spokesman

for the hallucinogen LSD, or acid.

Having led psychedelic experiments at

Harvard University since the turn of the '60s,

and with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg a key early supporter,

by 1965 Leary was becoming a major countercultural figure.

- Tim Leary was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, psychotherapist.

He claimed to have something like seven PhDs.

He was a professor at Harvard

who began working originally with psilocybin

before he got onto LSD

as a way of treating prisoners and treating mental illness.

I mean, the thing is Leary was very much part

of the Establishment.

He'd worked right across the normal lines of psychiatry.

But, of course, when he started to take all these things,

he contacted his own self on a cellular level

and he realized that an awful lot of this

was gameplaying and rubbish.

So he basically felt that this was in fact a spiritual key

that he'd been handed

and that his message really should be

to encourage people to leave the Establishment

and find themselves creatively or spiritually.

- And the newly appointed MBEs, The Beatles,

were already on their way to leaving the Establishment

and rediscovering themselves through hallucinogens.

John Lennon and George Harrison had been introduced

to LSD in early 1965, and had been joined by Ringo Starr

for their second experience with the drug later that year.

Combined with Paul McCartney's newfound interest

in experimental art through his London social circle,

the world's most commercial band

were ready to take a very unexpected detour.

- They wanted to discover who they were.

They had no real sense of who they were, I think, anymore.

So they were picking up the pieces,

putting it together it again.

How the hell did they make sense

of the goldfish bowl life they'd been thrown into?

From playing at the Casbah in Liverpool, and the Cavern,

to being feted all around the world

and just seeing themselves reflected back,

people getting pieces of them everywhere,

not knowing really who they were.

And I think that was the engagement of pop culture,

represented by The Beatles with the counterculture,

which was growing in confidence.

And the fact that the two started to join forces

in London, in San Francisco-- they sparked off each other.

- It was at the close of 1965

that McCartney drew the ever skeptical Lennon

out of his Surrey sanctuary

and introduced him to the underground world of Miles

and the Indica Bookshop and Gallery.

- One day, very shortly after we opened,

Paul McCartney showed up with John Lennon,

I think it was the first time John was ever in the shop.

He was looking for a book by "Nitzske."

I just didn't know who he meant.

It took me maybe half a minute

to figure out it was Nietzsche.

And that was just enough time for him to get quite irritated

and think I was being this middle class university type,

putting him down.

And then Paul had to do his usual role

of sort of calming everybody.

"No, no, he went to art school just like you.

It's just 'cause you didn't know how to say it!"

In the meantime,

I remembered we had only just the day before

had a big shipment

of The Psychedelic Experience by Tim Leary.

John curled up on the settee with it.

And literally in Tim Leary's introduction

before you even get to the text,

it says, turn off your mind, relax

and drift down the stream, or however the lines are

that finally showed up only about a month later

in Tomorrow Never Knows.

- This song would be

the most innovative composition

of the band's career to date.

Alongside Lennon's Leary-inspired lyrics,

Paul McCartney's contributions

to the track were equally radical.

Having joined Miles at a number

of avant-garde electronic music events,

the Beatle had begun enthusiastically working

on his own experimental compositions

using loops of recorded tape.

As The Beatles entered the studio

to begin producing Tomorrow Never Knows,

George Martin invited McCartney

to bring these to the sessions.

- He had produced a whole load of them

and brought them into the studio just in a plastic bag.

They arranged the studio

so that there were different tape recorders

in different parts of the Abbey Road studio complex.

And I was in a room with Peter Asher

and we were playing quite a long loop

which entailed holding a jam jar.

The loop went round the jam jar,

then past the playback head and then back over.

We had to keep it in tension.

I think there were eight or maybe even 10 of us

around the building

all standing holding pencils or jam jars.

And all of this information was going into the deck.

George Martin was just sitting there with his headphones.

Whatever he did, of course,

it was impossible to ever reproduce.

That was it.

That was the master as soon as he pressed "record."

When I heard the playback, it was astonishing actually.

I thought, "Good God, this is the future."

["Tomorrow Never Knows" by The Beatles]

♪ Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream

♪ It is not dying, it is not dying...♪

- The studio was an instrument.

Once upon a time, it was just this almost invisible console

that was just there

to absorb what was being played on the floor.

Now it was actually being used as an instrument.

And it was more important

than individual instruments, in a way.

This was unprecedented, and the other interesting thing

about Tomorrow Never Knows,

it was the first recording for Revolver.

It was done in April '66.

I mean, this is extraordinary.

Tomorrow Never Knows

is undoubtedly the most psychedelic song recorded

at that period.

There's nothing else like it.

I mean, the word psychedelic wasn't really

in popular parlance at all.

It was the title of a book

that John got from Indica Gallery.

- Tomorrow Never Knows

is definitely the world's first psychedelic track.

The interesting thing is, of course,

The Beatles were not only the world's most commercial band,

but at that point they were also

the world's most experimental band, which is very unusual.

- That became clear when The Beatles' follow-up

to Rubber Soul, Revolver, was issued in August 1966.

Alongside Tomorrow Never Knows,

the album's tracks were brimming

with invention and originality.

If Rubber Soul had suggested that pop music could be art,

Revolver confirmed it.

- Revolver really was The Beatles

moving towards the fifth dimension.

"She said, she said I know what it's like to be dead."

The Beatles, Lennon, singing about

I know what it's like to be dead.

What the hell is going on?

Well, they've been partying with The Byrds

on the West Coast and dropping acid by then.

Drugs, we have a very negative view on them now

and you can be imprisoned by them, but in the mid '60s

people felt it was the opposite.

It was to loosen the chains of imprisonment,

this single view of who you were.

And then suddenly you had perspectives,

and with Revolver you can hear it,

with all the different production sounds--

it was all altered states and perspectives.

- The idea was basically to turn rock and roll

into a legitimate art form.

And I think they did it.

So many of the things they tried,

from feedback and reverse tapes and sitars,

whatever they did,

all over the world other bands immediately tried out.

They were tremendous leaders.

Brian Epstein was concerned

that they were going too far ahead of their fan base.

But they were very, very sensible,

they always wanted to bring the fans along with them.

They didn't want to become some kind of wild,

avant-garde band that only 150 people had heard of.

- Epstein's fears that the band

would start to lose some of their audience were unfounded

regarding their musical output,

but would prove accurate in terms of their politics.

With The Beatles' compositions

expressing a more complex world view,

journalists began to ask them more significant questions.

In a series of landmark interviews

for British newspaper The Evening Standard,

the individual band members were quizzed

over their thoughts on current affairs.

Lennon's frank opinions on Christianity

proved uncontroversial upon their publication in Britain,

yet when they were reprinted in America,

the first scandal of The Beatles' career erupted,

with a single quote becoming instantly infamous,

"We're more popular than Jesus now."

- The first time anybody had asked John Lennon

questions about his life and his philosophy.

And it just passed--whoosh-- without--

But months later, all those teenage magazines

just printed that: "We're bigger than Jesus,"

which caused a lot of problems.

A lot of problems.

Death threats and records being burnt

and broken and smashed,

and the Ku Klux Klan, and concerts being canceled.

It was very unpleasant for everyone.

- Well, originally I was pointing out that fact

in reference to England,

that we meant more to kids than Jesus did,

or religion, at that time.

I wasn't knocking it or putting it down.

I was just saying it. It was a fact.

- Lennon's "The Beatles are more popular than Jesus" line,

which even to me as a kid, I could see what he was saying.

I mean, he wasn't saying--

It's what he said in his quote unquote "apology."

"I wasn't saying we're better than Jesus.

"I wasn't saying it's good or it's bad.

It's just that it's true."

And to me it was absolutely true.

It was unquestionable.

There was such a backlash against that.

It made you aware of some of the fault lines

in American culture.

Or made you aware once again that what seemed maybe

like a unified culture, really wasn't.

And it was harsh. You know, it was scary.

- These fault lines in American society

had been growing since the early 1960s,

and where the civil rights campaigns for racial equality

had most clearly exposed these divisions

earlier in the decade, by the mid 1960s

there was no issue more pressing or more polarizing

than the Vietnam War.

Since the US entered into the conflict in 1962,

it had provoked widespread public opposition

and organized protests both in the US and across Europe.

The underground movement McCartney had become involved in

had itself emerged from the early '60s pacifist movement

in the UK, and by the time of their 1966 US tour,

privately both he and his bandmates

were opponents of the war.

As they traveled across America,

already battling controversy,

the ever honest Liverpudlians came under fire once again

when they made this position absolutely clear to the press.

- In 1966, the war was without any question

much more on people's minds in America than The Beatles.

Nineteen-sixty-six was the year the war exploded.

Nineteen-sixty-six was the year that the number of draftees

more than doubled in this country.

Nineteen-sixty-six was also the year

in which the war really got terrible in Vietnam itself.

It was a bigger, bigger deal all the time.

There was more destruction going on.

- At the height of American involvement in Vietnam,

they had 550,000 troops in that country.

I mean, that's a lot of young people.

There was a draft in the United States.

The war had come home in a big way.

It wasn't an abstract issue in any regard.

And youth representatives like The Beatles,

people who were part of youth culture,

were expected to take a stand on it.

- It seems to me you've always been successful

because you've been outspoken and direct and forthright

and all this sort of thing.

Does it seem a bit hard to you

that people are now knocking you for this very thing?

- Yes, Richard.

- It seems very hard. - It seems hard.

But you know, free speech.

- But is it possible just to say what you think

all the time? What about 14-year-old teenagers

who think you're absolutely marvelous

and can't bear to be hurt?

- When we say anything like that, we don't say it,

as older people seem to think, to be offensive.

We mean it helpfully, you know.

And if it's wrong what we say, okay, it's wrong.

People can say you're wrong about that one.

But in many cases, we believe it's right.

We're quite serious about it.

- Do you mind being asked questions?

For example, in America

people keep asking you questions about Vietnam.

Does this seem useful? - Well, I don't know.

If you can say that war's no good

and a few people believe you, then it may be good.

You can't say it too much, though, that's the trouble.

- It seems a bit silly to be in America

and for none of them to mention Vietnam

as if nothing was happening.

- They were the first band to be asked about politics,

about Vietnam, about a whole number of social issues.

And in fact, I mean,

although Dylan came a little bit before,

as far as I know, he never once ever came out in public

against the Vietnam War.

So maybe The Beatles were the first there,

in terms of a very well-known band.

- Well, it cost them a lot.

There were then teenage girls in the South, in the Midwest,

who didn't like The Beatles anymore.

- I think The Beatles are a real talented group,

but I think they need to watch what they say,

because they're in such a position

that a lot of teenagers really think of them

as something really big.

When they say things like that

some teenagers are going to just believe anything they say.

- In 1965, The Beatles were universally beloved.

Nobody didn't like them.

They were just wonderful and funny

and creative and unthreatening.

As they became more involved in the counterculture

and more representative of it,

they lost a lot of that belovedness.

They helped to move a lot of people

who might not otherwise have gone along

with the stuff that happened in '66 and '67 and '68.

Without any question,

they were inspirational and influential in that way.

But they also lost a lot of people.

They became part of what many, many people in America,

probably a majority of people in America,

regarded as a disturbing...

loosening of values and morals.

And a political threat.

- And at exactly this point,

The Beatles ceased operating as a traditional band.

Upon their return from the US,

they announced that they were abandoning live performance,

with the final show

of the American tour their last ever paid gig.

And then the most photographed celebrities in the world

simply disappeared from the public eye altogether.

- Can I have a word?

Are The Beatles going to go their own ways in 1967?

- We could be on our own or together.

We're always involved with each other, whatever we're doing.

- Could you ever see a time

when you weren't working together?

- I could see us working not together for a period,

but we'd always get together for one reason or another.

I mean, you need other people for ideas as well,

you know, and we all get along fine.

- Rumors of a break-up began to circulate.

Yet, away from the spotlight,

the four Liverpudlians were hard at work

on their most ambitious production to date.

The public would have to wait for months

before The Beatles reappeared,

and when, in February 1967, they finally did,

both their image and their sound

had undergone a startling transformation.

- Strawberry Fields of course was originally intended

as part of the Sgt. Pepper sessions.

But the press kept on saying, "Are The Beatles finished?

"They've disappeared, they've run out of ideas,"

not realizing that they were working

on one of their greatest achievements.

And to me, obviously, it wasn't unexpected

because, well, I was at some of the sessions.

But I think to the public it came as quite a shock.

♪ Let me take you down

♪ 'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields... ♪

- "Strawberry Fields Forever" was something else again.

It was: The Beatles had gone weird.

That was basically what people felt.

What is wrong with them? That's--

"Let me take you down

'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields."

The voice, it didn't sound like Lennon.

Well, that's because they'd slowed the voice down.

Nothing sounded normal on that record.

The whole production.

Everything was up in the air, put through effects.

And then there was a video that was made at the time as well,

shot in Sevenoaks or somewhere, and it was the strangest thing.

You had Ringo as if he was disembodied.

They were falling out of trees.

There was nothing like that at all.

♪ Living is easy with eyes closed

♪ Misunderstanding all you see

♪ It's getting hard to be someone

♪ But it all works out

♪ It doesn't matter much to me...♪

-It had more in common with Salvador Dali

and the Surrealists and Dada.

All these highfalutin art kind of ideas,

which was once the preserve, really,

mainly, of the educated elite.

But this is The Beatles now bringing it to everybody.

- The short film for Strawberry Fields had a seismic impact

because it showed that they had traveled a distance

that, well, I felt it kind of incumbent on me

to then travel as a young person who believed in them.

It was like, "Wow, okay,

this is what's being asked of me now."

It wasn't just, "Oh, they look cool."

It was, "All right, this is the path."

- And that path became even clearer

as the year progressed.

By the turn of 1967,

the counterculture was gaining momentum,

with huge numbers of youths

gravitating towards its new Mecca,

San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district.

From here, a strong musical scene was developing,

headed by psychedelic bands The Grateful Dead

and the Jefferson Airplane,

and word spread of a new phenomenon: the hippy.

In the UK, the underground's influence expanded,

with its own newspaper, The International Times,

a live music club, UFO,

and emerging stars the Pink Floyd

and the American, Jimi Hendrix.

Into this blooming scene of peace, love

and mind-expanding drugs,

came The Beatles' most ambitious work to date,

one which would not only capture the essence

of this new sensibility,

but also transform the record industry once again:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Presented as a work of art,

with a single concept unifying the album as a whole,

it announced that the age of the traditional pop single

and the pop band was over.

- Sgt. Pepper revolutionized the record industry.

All of a sudden, albums sold as much as singles.

Sgt. Pepper sold in the millions.

On pure business terms, it was a revolutionary release.

But also it was revolutionary in terms

of letting the record industry know

precisely what it could sell.

What you could do is invest in the finest artistic minds

of a generation and give them the freedom to make their art,

package it up as an album and sell it in the millions.

- Paul had this idea of, "we want to get away

"from being the four mop-tops and The Fab Four.

"So we create this new name for ourselves.

"We're going to be a different group.

That'll give us the freedom to do what the hell we want."

That is the basic concept. The songs--

many of those songs could have been on

any of the other albums.

They weren't specific to that particular one.

But the influence of it was staggering.

The Beatles were a force to be reckoned with.

Even The Stones were badly affected by them at that point.

Everyone just had to deal with them.

They were like a roadblock.

If you were in the music business,

you had to deal with this great big thing

in front of you and get round it the best you could.

♪ Lucy in the sky with diamonds ♪

♪ Lucy in the sky with diamonds ♪

♪ Lucy in the sky with diamonds ♪

♪ Ah

♪ Follow her down to a bridge...♪

- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club's Band,

I mean, just the title itself was a piece of art

and something that mystified people.

Peter Blake did the cover,

and Peter Blake was the father of British Pop Art.

Everything about Sgt. Pepper was an enigma.

The fact that they were pretending to not be The Beatles

but to be another band.

The locked groove at the end of side two.

Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Ah, L-S-D.

Secret messages all the way through.

It was like a work of literature.

It was like a Ulysses or something,

where people were just thinking,

I don't quite understand this

but there's definitely something really going on.

- This combination of imagination

and mystery proved irresistible.

With Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles transformed

from pop culture icons into mystics of the modern age.

- When The Beatles came out with their new song,

people started pondering that these are people

that you're looking to for meaning.

- By '67, I think the release

of Sgt. Pepper in America

established The Beatles basically

as the leaders of the counterculture

along with a few other people

like Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary.

But The Beatles were the musical leaders.

Right across the board, they were seen as, yes, as gods.

Leary himself said a lot of silly things about them,

they were a type of new superheroes, leaders of men,

and all this stuff.

- I'm not convinced that the youth culture in the mid '60s

were terribly aware of LSD and Timothy Leary

and even counterculture attitudes.

If it hadn't been for that conduit that was The Beatles,

this sort of stuff might have just stayed

in San Francisco, in California.

The counterculture wasn't called the "underground"

for no reason.

Not many people knew about it.

- Yet The Beatles were determined

to spread the word even further.

At the end of June 1967,

less than a month after the release of Sgt. Pepper's,

the band were invited

to represent Britain in the first ever

international satellite television broadcast.

Across the US, Canada and Europe,

the youthful optimism of the counterculture

was reaching its peak during the Summer of Love,

with thousands flocking to large public events.

With their historic contribution to the One World broadcast,

The Beatles delivered the scene's definitive anthem

to an audience of over 500 million viewers worldwide.

- The Beatles, true to form,

national representatives representing their country,

they start with the national anthem.

The only problem is it's the French national anthem!

That's a classic.

That is total Beatles humor.

["All You Need Is Love" by The Beatles]

♪ Love, love, love

♪ Love, love, love

♪ Love, love, love...♪

- It was fun. I was at that one.

It was like a party.

They'd invited a load of their friends,

The Small Faces and The Rolling Stones,

and everybody was there, all in our psychedelic finery.

Sitting on the floor there,

it looked like it might all explode at some point.

And there was an awful lot of frantic waving

and people rushing around,

holding on to their headphones and talking to people.

That was mostly

to do with the international link-up, though,

because no one had ever done that before.

It really did go out live all around the world.

It was fantastic.

♪ All you need is love

♪ All you need is love

♪ All you need is love, love

♪ Love is all you need...♪

- This is mere weeks after the release of Sgt. Pepper.

Every other band would choose to use that moment

to promote Sgt. Pepper by doing a couple of tracks from it.

Right? It just makes total business sense.

But they took the opportunity to send a message to the world

that all you need is love.

They'd already been saying it on Rubber Soul,

the word is love.

But this was the time they could tell the whole world

all at the same time.

The Beatles are clearly leading the way.

I think there's a great significance

in the idea of them sitting on those high chairs,

with the beautiful people of London, including Mick Jagger,

sitting at their feet, looking up at them

and singing along to a song they've only just heard.

That's powerful.

- All You Need Is Love was an anthem of hope

from a youth movement certain that the old order

was about to crumble.

The Beatles were steering an entire generation

into uncharted territory,

yet it would not take the Establishment long

to respond to these peaceful revolutionaries.

In the UK, the police were mobilized

and began to make a number of drug busts,

arresting not only prominent figures

on the underground scene

but also Mick Jagger, Keith Richards

and later Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.

These high-profile cases

didn't faze Paul McCartney, however.

Following the arrests, he not only paid for,

but also put his name to a national press advert

calling for the legalization of marijuana.

Weeks later, he admitted to a journalist

that he had taken LSD

and repeated this in a television interview,

much to the shock of Brian Epstein.

- Brian didn't like things being made public.

He was a very private person,

obviously, because of his way of life.

The thing about drugs is it wasn't

anything about them being good or bad.

It's just it was illegal.

- Paul, how often have you taken LSD?

- About four times.

- Where did you get it from?

- If I was to say where I got it from, it's illegal.

It's silly to say that.

- Don't you believe that this was a matter

which you should have kept private?

- The thing is, I was asked a question by a newspaper

and the decision was whether to tell a lie

or to tell him the truth.

I decided to tell him the truth.

But I really didn't want to say anything.

If I'd had my decision, if I had it my way,

I wouldn't have told anyone.

'Cause I'm not trying to spread the word about this.

But the man from the newspaper is the man

from the mass medium.

I'll keep it a personal thing if he does too,

if he keeps it quiet.

But he wanted to spread it.

So it's his responsibility for spreading it, not mine.

- The thing is, Paul is always honest.

If a reporter asked him, have you taken LSD?,

he's going to say yes. He wouldn't lie.

Why should he?

If they're going to ask that question,

they get an honest answer.

It was a risky thing for him to say.

It probably gave Brian Epstein a conniption.

But basically, although The Beatles had made a lot of money,

they were never really in it for the money.

Once they had enough to really live well, that was it.

I think that was a very good sign of them.

They paid their tax and they said what they wanted.

- The Beatles' sense of security

was about to be challenged, however.

In late August, the band were shocked to receive the news

that their manager Brian Epstein had died,

their most trusted accomplice.

In his absence they were suddenly left

without his stabilizing influence.

At the same time,

their quest for personal and spiritual growth continued.

George Harrison had become fascinated

by Indian music in 1965,

and as he immersed himself in its techniques,

he became increasingly drawn to its spiritual foundations.

This led him to discover the Indian guru

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

and his technique of transcendental meditation.

By mid-1967, Harrison was introducing his bandmates

to the Maharishi's ideas,

and soon The Beatles had a new spiritual advisor.

- When they first got involved with him,

I wrote and asked Allen Ginsberg what the story

was on the Maharishi, in India,

because Ginsberg had lived there for a number of years

and he knew a lot of the gurus and the teachers.

He wrote back saying the Maharishi was very commercial

and that he was under a lot of criticism in India

for taking disciples' money,

because in fact the teaching should be free.

So I reported this to John Lennon who came out

with a wonderful line of,

"Ain't no ethnic bastard

going to get any golden castles out of me."

- Despite his initial reservations,

in February 1968, Lennon and his bandmates

traveled to India for an extended retreat with the guru.

Joined by their various wives and girlfriends,

their departure to the East for spiritual fulfillment

made headlines worldwide.

The press swarmed around the perimeter

of the Maharishi's 14-acre compound,

both intrigued and baffled by this latest chapter

in The Beatles' unpredictable journey.

This exposure brought Eastern religion to the attention

of an enormous audience.

- Sometime in January, it was sudden,

"Right, we're off to Maharishi

to live in a holiday camp in India."

"Oh, right. Have a good time.

But they did write a heck of a lot of songs

while they were there, churning them out.

- The Beatles introduced the world,

especially the young world,

to things they would never have stumbled upon

had The Beatles not been there.

The philosophy behind transcendental

meditation, Buddhism, they were looking outwards.

Meditation was at the center of it.

That's actually really all that matters.

It's the soul. The reality is here.

Not many people had really thought about that before.

And if The Beatles, the most popular band in the world,

the most popular cultural phenomenon in the world,

were talking earnestly about this stuff,

obviously, as much as a lot of the elders might laugh,

at least as many young people went along with them.

And, you know, sales of texts of Eastern wisdom

went through the roof in the late '60s.

People flocked to see the Maharishi.

The Beatles were this gateway to another world.

- Although the band emerged from India

both spiritually and creatively refreshed,

this sense of calm would be short-lived.

In February 1968, they set up their own corporation, Apple.

This multifaceted company was developed

to broaden The Beatles' activities

and to retain full control over their output.

Yet it would prove the first of many overambitious projects

for the band.

As they entered the studio in the summer

to work on their follow-up to Sgt. Pepper,

for the first time, creative and personal disputes

crept into the recording sessions.

A particular source of tension was the daily presence

of an outsider in The Beatles' inner sanctum,

the conceptual artist Yoko Ono,

with whom John Lennon had fallen deeply in love.

It was a relationship that had been blossoming, in private,

for more than a year.

While McCartney had been growing in confidence

through his underground activities,

Lennon's sense of isolation in rural Surrey had increased.

Initially finding a release through LSD,

it was Yoko Ono who offered him a means of escape.

A relatively unknown artist when she had traveled to London

with husband Tony Cox in 1966,

it was through the Indica Gallery

that she came into contact with Lennon.

Its owner, John Dunbar, provided the space

for Ono's first UK exhibition,

and it was he who invited his Beatle friend

to attend this unusual show.

- She was plainly an interesting, powerful woman.

I didn't show ordinary pictures on the wall at all, really.

And so, you know, she had some good ideas and I liked them.

She wanted to do a show.

We managed to find a couple of weeks

where we didn't have something on.

Yoko was reluctant to have anybody look at it

until she'd totally finished and labeled everything.

So we were sort of doing that.

But me and Tony had to sort of tell her,

"Look, this guy might buy something, you never know."

He came round and he did like the ladder

and then looking through the magnifying glass

and it says "yes," so, he liked that.

- The relationship that developed

across the following two years

would be consummated in May 1968,

just before The Beatles began work on the White Album.

Lennon emerged a changed man,

released from an unhappy marriage

and liberated as an artist.

- The arrival of Yoko Ono into John's life

transformed Lennon completely.

She was the mother, lover, teacher.

She was kind of everything really to John. He needed that.

- When he met Yoko, she was basically a mother figure.

I mean, he used to call her "mother."

She, for her own reasons, took him on,

and saved him, actually.

- As Ono's presence made an impact on both Lennon

and the bond between The Beatles,

the world outside of the band began to darken.

As the war in Vietnam spiraled further out of control

and with no apparent end to the conflict in sight,

across the West, the cultural movement so inspired

by The Beatles

no longer believed love is all you need.

The progressive, liberal core of the counterculture

came under fire, with the assassinations

of, first, civil rights leader Martin Luther King,

and, then, Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy,

increasing tensions.

Both in the US and Britain,

once peaceful anti-war demonstrations

descended into violence.

Student riots brought Paris to a standstill,

and images of street skirmishes

and police brutality became commonplace.

As the authorities led an unforgiving onslaught

on the counterculture,

revolution replaced love as the new objective.

- In '68, it all exploded.

You know, you had assassinations in the States,

the threat of civil war,

riots in the Democratic Convention,

riots in Paris, in London, violence on the streets.

Actually, there was a sort of a fight. Power--

you don't really get power, it won't trickle down.

It has to be sort of...forced.

If you look at history, that tends to be the case.

The Beatles revolution was a benign one,

through art and love,

but by '68, the bricks were flying all over the place.

- It wasn't just the sweet utopianism

of the Summer of Love, but really days of rage.

The demonstrations at the Democratic Convention

in Chicago in 1968,

you know, was a kind of dividing line.

You saw the police out there clubbing kids,

and there really was a sense of, "We're kind of at war now."

- Just as this unrestrained police brutality

tore through Chicago in August 1968,

The Beatles issued the single Revolution,

addressing the struggles of a youth culture under threat.

Yet unlike All You Need Is Love the previous year,

John Lennon's composition refused to express the voice

of this disillusioned movement

or to accept the call to arms of the radical Left.

For the first time, this saw The Beatles turned upon

by their own peers.

Yet Lennon's reluctance to commit to violence

not only led to two different versions of the track

but also reflected the inner struggles

that many young people were dealing with.

- The song Revolution,

there are two versions of it.

Lennon goes back and forth on

"don't you know that you can count me out"

as far as Revolution is concerned.

Exactly where you were supposed to stand was difficult.

All young people were feeling that.

You know, go to a protest? Yeah, sure.

Go to a protest that maybe occupies a building? Oh, maybe.

You know, burning that building down?

Do you draw the line there?

♪ You say you want a revolution

♪ Well, you know

♪ We'd all love to change the world

♪ You tell me that it's evolution

♪ Well, you know

♪ We'd all love to see the word

♪ But when you talk about destruction

♪ Don't you know that you can count me out, in... ♪

- If you're talking about destruction

Lennon's saying count me out then he's saying count me in.

He doesn't know.

He's on the fence at that point.

Lennon, as much as he could be a bit handy,

was seduced by this idea of peace and love.

He'd just written the anthem of the previous year.

- There always was a kind of inherent optimism

in The Beatles somehow,

whereas that wasn't true of Dylan,

it wasn't true of The Stones.

It was almost like Martin Luther King.

People don't say this now

but there was a sense in which a lot of the black radicals

who were emerging seemed more of the moment.

Dr. King seemed like kind of part

of the protest Establishment.

And in a certain way

The Beatles seemed a little bit like that too.

- If the band were losing some of their relevance

as a cultural force through Yoko Ono's influence,

John Lennon ensured that they remained musical pioneers.

Where Revolution had pulled its punches politically,

an experimental collage that he created with his new partner

captured the chaos of 1968 simply through sound itself.

When it was issued on the band's self-titled LP

at the close of the year, the track Revolution 9

became the most widely heard

avant-garde composition ever released.

It was a startling statement from a man

who had been heralding

in the Summer of Love only a year beforehand.

- He went from one extreme to the other.

Lennon suddenly saw it's all gone wrong.

He turned to the flip side,

and the flip side was Revolution number 9,

Revolution 9, which was a very,

very different view of the future.

♪ Number nine, number nine

♪ Number nine, number nine, number nine... ♪

Revolution 9 was the sound really

of not just the riots in Paris or the streets of Chicago.

This is the sound of the apocalypse.

["Revolution 9" by The Beatles]

This is his incredibly honest depiction

of the worst fear of all

which is a society and a world in global turmoil.

It's an extraordinary piece,

and one of the scariest pieces of music you could ever hear.

In the 21st century,

Revolution 9 is far more relevant

than it ever was in '68.

- Having delivered the most extreme composition

in The Beatles' catalog,

Lennon's further experimental activities

continued outside of the band.

By the end of 1968,

the first of a trilogy of albums with Yoko Ono was issued -

Two Virgins, with a cover depicting the couple naked.

Still a member of the most popular

and commercially successful act in the world,

Lennon was now breaking every rule imaginable.

Yet the anger in some quarters of the counterculture

toward the song Revolution also led him

into a greater political role.

In 1969, as Richard Nixon was sworn in

as the new President of America,

John Lennon and Yoko Ono emerged

as the world's most prominent activists.

- When Lennon came out and said,

if you're talking about destruction, count me out,

he was terribly criticized by the hard Left.

And it seems to me that his reaction to that

was not to change his mind about destruction,

but actually to say,

"No, I really don't think the answer is destruction.

I think the answer actually is peace."

- In March 1969,

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were married.

With their honeymoon, the couple embarked

on a high-profile campaign for peace,

presented as a series of conceptual art events.

In the spirit of The Beatles' initial attitude to the press,

the first of these took place in their hotel bridal suite,

in which they invited journalists

to discuss politics openly and frankly.

- This is for world peace.

And we're thinking that instead of going out and fight,

and make war, something like that,

we should just stay in bed,

everybody should just stay in bed and enjoy the spring.

- He put his career right on the line there for his beliefs.

And you have to applaud him for that, of course.

It brought him an awful lot of harassment and trouble.

- While you're in bed

and you're giving your press conferences in pillow cases,

are you laughing at us? - No, no.

- No more than you're laughing at us.

We have a laugh, we think it's funny,

the fact that the front page news should be the fact

that two people went to bed on their honeymoon.

We see the funny side of it.

And that in Vienna, which is a pretty square place,

there's all these beautiful photographs

of microphones being held to a bag,

to wait for the bag to speak.

-It's rather nice.

-But we're serious about the peace bit.

- Brave, foolhardy, they were all of that.

But who else would have done that then?

It would be front page news if they were in bed,

talking about peace.

John didn't know necessarily the ins and outs

of the whole Vietnam thing.

He and Yoko knew that it was wrong

to be dropping napalm on villages

and stripping the skin off children.

I mean, he wasn't wrong in that thinking.

He really wasn't wrong.

- As the couple's honeymoon moved

from Europe to Canada,

they were joined in their hotel room by Timothy Leary,

Allen Ginsberg and a variety of counterculture figures,

to record an anthem for their campaign.

And where their experimental records

and their public appearances had left many confused,

this song managed to bring their message

to a global audience.

- Give Peace a Chance was his attempt

to do something in his own terms that was actually useful

and I think it proved to be so.

He wrote an anthem. It's a simplistic anthem,

but it's an anthem that has a good heart and a good message

and that people have been singing ever since.

["Give Peace A Chance"]

♪ Ev'rybody's talking 'bout Bagism, Shagism

♪ Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism

♪ This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m

♪ All we are saying

♪ Is give peace a chance

♪ All we are saying

♪ Is give peace a chance... ♪

- He's moved further and further away

from the elegant combination

of artistic musical choices and resonant text

into records that only have a message.

He had that ability to distill something down

to its bare essence, make it communicative,

make it unforgettable, and it still resonates to this day.

- While Lennon pressed on

campaigning for peace,

the close of the decade saw the first major casualties

of the youth movement,

with the death of Rolling Stone Brian Jones

and permanent narcotics damage

on both Beach Boy Brian Wilson and Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett.

The utopian vision of a brave new world was crumbling,

and this was reflected within The Beatles camp itself.

The tensions that had previously arisen in the studio

now spread into the bandmates' own relationships

with each other, and when McCartney

married his new partner Linda Eastman in 1969,

none of his fellow Beatles attended the ceremony.

As the world moved into the 1970s,

Paul issued his debut solo record

along with a press release

which announced that he was quitting the band.

It was official. The Beatles were no more.

The demise of the band shocked their fans worldwide,

yet those close to the musicians

had watched them gradually drift apart

over a two-year period.

- There was no cohesion.

The old Liverpool bubble that they all used to live in

and see each other all the time and love each other

and be tolerant of each other's foibles

and differences had gone.

So now they were spinning off in different directions

with new ideas, new families, new girlfriends, new children.

It just wasn't working anymore.

It was obvious really

that The Beatles as a group had pretty much come to an end.

- Has a multi-million dollar entertainment act

ever broken up because it wasn't fun anymore?

Well, we know actually

because so many groups from that same period

continued and continued and continued

when it most definitely wasn't fun anymore.

The Beatles ended it because the reasons

that they had gotten into doing it

ceased to have value for them.

So they said, let's not do this anymore.

That's as powerful a statement about their integrity

and their intentions and their values

as anything that I can think of.

- In The Beatles' wake,

youth culture became more divided,

rock music got heavier and more self-indulgent

and pop turned its attention to glamor.

As for the band members themselves,

despite Lennon's continued activism

and string of hit singles,

McCartney's mainstream triumph through his band Wings

and Harrison's successful emergence

as an artist in his own right,

their impact as individuals could never match that

of their Beatles glory days.

Yet although their vision of utopia

had failed to materialize,

the world was still forever changed

by The Beatles' innovations

and the values that they represented.

Even if no one has ever managed to compete with that impact,

with every successive generation of musicians

The Beatles remain the benchmark

for how popular entertainers can interact

with the wider world.

- Did cultural and musical changes,

to which they were without any doubt

the largest contributors, have a permanent effect

on how rock and roll conceived itself?

Yeah, permanent effect

on how rock and roll perceived itself.

So that there's even now in this glitzy pop era,

pop stars see it as an option

that they have to accept or refuse

to be conscious, controversial...

and some choose one, and others really deny it,

and some are extremely bland,

but it's there on the table.

Always there on the table, for everybody.

- And as the band's astonishing achievements

continue to make an impact half a century later,

the legacy of The Beatles,

and of the remarkable decade

in which they flourished, remains unrivaled.

The unique story of four working class Liverpudlians

who changed the world.

- Lennon said something along the lines of,

"We weren't leaders in this world.

"We were just the guys on the mast saying land ahoy.

We were letting you know what we could see."

And without The Beatles, understanding the '60s

would have been a completely different experience.

- They touched everything.

The Beatles covered it all.

If you want to know what the '60s were about,

you listen to Beatles records.

It tells you-- the story is there.

- It sounds like a cliché, but it's really impossible

to overstate The Beatles' impact.

It sounds like you're exaggerating,

and to younger people who weren't there,

you know, it just sounds ridiculous.

But it was true. They changed everything.