It has been 50 years since The Beatles broke up but they are still regarded as the most influential band of all time. When John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met in 1957, they had no idea that they were about to change the face of music forever. Three years later, the band, complete with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, embarked on a tour of Hamburg, Germany. It was that tour that shot them into the limelight.
They are the best selling band in history, with more than 600 million albums sold.
Five decades later and The Beatles still dominate the charts. In the last few years they have had three top 10 albums, including a Billboard No. 1, and are one of two bands to have sold one million albums in that time period. Only the Korean boy band BTS has been able to match their recent fame, according to Daily News. What separates them is the long list of accolades The Beatles have achieved.
For a large part of their career, the foursome were inseparable and it showed in their music. By the mid-1960s, they were on fire, riding the wave of success of their albums "Rubber Soul," "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper." They had received several Grammy Awards and numerous other awards. They would go on to release 12 studio albums, 13 extended plays (EPs) and 22 singles. There was pressure though, and over the years the cracks began to show.
It was drugs, creative differences and outside interference that led to the band's much-dissected demise. Lennon left The Beatles shortly before marrying Yoko Ono in 1969 and McCartney was left with two choices. He could continue the band without one of the main songwriters or he could let the group disband. In 1970 the band had officially split.
The Beatles’ impact on the world has been noted by everyone from music critics to world leaders. Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, said: "More than any ideology, more than any religion, more than Vietnam or any war or nuclear bomb, the single most important reason for the diffusion of the Cold War was … The Beatles.”
One music critic said the group single-handedly rescued the western music scene, numerous music legends have said The Beatles were not only their biggest influence but also changed music forever.
Decades later and director Peter Jackson is gearing up to release "The Beatles: Get Back," a documentary covering the making of the band's album "Let It Be," which had the original title of "Get Back." The film features material from 1969, which director Michael Lindsay-Hogg used for his 1970 documentary of the album.
"They’re only the icons they are because the music was so majestically good," Jackson said of The Beatles, according to Rolling Stone. "I’m not a musicologist, that’s not where I come from. But all I would say is, no matter if it’s two tracks or four tracks or eight tracks, there’s a joy in the songs that they sang. In decades and decades to come, it will never be dulled. It will never be suppressed. That joy, that infectious joy, is part of the human psyche now.”
Some numbers that quantify the band’s success:
1.6 billion: Beatles singles sold in the U.S.
3,000+: Number of times the song “Yesterday” has been covered, the most of any song.
1,278: Number of weeks Beatles material spent on Billboard charts.
20: No. 1 singles, the most of any group.
25: Number of Beatles’ albums that reached No.1 in the U.S.
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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