Found this article taken from The New Statesman 8 November 1963 describing how the Beatles peaked in 1963 according to New Statesman music columnist Francis Newton. Had to smile at the last sentence :lol:

 

Taken from The New Statesman 8 November 1963

Under the pseudonym Francis Newton, the distinguished Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm used to write a regular column in the New Statesman as its jazz critic. Occasionally his interest would stray from the blues to popular music, as this article on the Beatles illustrates. Newton predicted that the young Merseyside group had already peaked in 1963 and that within 20 years nobody would remember them. But, as Hobsbawm was the first to acknowledge, the music of the Beatles grew in maturity. His wide-ranging and authoritative pieces on jazz continue to provide an absorbing read and helped strengthen the reputation of the magazine's cultural pages.

Selected by Robert Taylor

Every so often performers become the excuse for (mainly feminine) teenage hysteria. When this happens in culturally unified societies, in which minds are lost over actors from the national theatre or ballerinas, it is rarely remarked upon. In ours it attracts attention, and the point arrives on the curve of hysteria when even those most insulated against first-hand contact with people like the Beatles (or, earlier, Cliff Richard or Bill Haley) discover their existence and want to know what it is all about.

The Beatles are an agreeable bunch of kids, quite unsinister (unlike some of the American teenage comets), with that charming combination of flamboyance and a certain hip self- mickey-taking, which is the ideal of their age-group. They are in fact the "new Elizabethans" for whom the bishops called ten years ago.

Much of their appeal has nothing to do with music at all, but with clothes, haircuts and stance. What they sell is not music, but "the sound", a slightly modified version of the heavily accented, electronically amplified noise which has long been familiar to rock-and-rollers and could at a pinch be described as the musique concrète of the masses. Anyone can produce that sound, and practically everyone with the money for the rather expensive gear has done so.

Probably because of the large Irish population, Merseyside has long been a matrix of urbanised folk culture, a fact discovered years ago by the folk-song crowd, and has long been enshrined via Liverpool-Welsh playwrights and Liverpool-based TV series in orthodox culture. Merseyside - and the Beatles - emerged as the recognised Nashville of Britain about a year ago, when entrepreneurs first became aware of the size of the market for the beat groups which had grown up spontaneously in provincial cellars and halls.

In such vogues, there is always one governor, for unlike football, the culture of pop music - being national and not municipal - does not divide naturally into the binary pattern which has given so many British cities their two rival teams. There is generally only one idol and it happens that this sympathetic group of lads has been cast for the part. They are probably just about to begin their slow descent: the moment when someone thinks of making a film with a pop idol normally marks the peak of his curve. In 29 years' time nothing of them will survive.

 

For the whole article http://www.newstatesman.com/200707020053

 

Well he knew his stuff didn't he :lol:

Edited July 2, 200718 yr by brian91