The Beatles

The Beatles were the most commercially successful and most imitated group in the history of popular music, and existed as a recording act for about seven years. They formed in Liverpool at the end of the 1950s around John Lennon, who was joined by Paul McCartney in 1957 and George Harrison in 1958; Ringo Starr replaced Pete Best in 1962. They served an apprenticeship in Hamburg from 1960, playing sets of six or eight hours a night in clubs on the Reeperbahn, which turned an amateur skiffle band into a hardened live act. Brian Epstein became their manager in 1961 and George Martin signed them to Parlophone in 1962. Martin's classical training and willingness to try anything in the studio is inseparable from what followed. Beatlemania began in Britain in 1963 and reached America in February 1964, when their Ed Sullivan appearance was watched by an estimated seventy-three million people. Lennon and McCartney credited everything jointly regardless of authorship, which produced perhaps the most productive songwriting partnership on record. They stopped touring in 1966, exhausted and unable to hear themselves, and became a studio band. Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album and Abbey Road used tape loops, backwards recording, Indian instruments, orchestras and four-track machines pushed past their design, and changed what a pop record could be. They also carried Indian classical music, psychedelia and the album as an art form into the mainstream. They split in 1970 amid business disputes and personal strain. Lennon was murdered in 1980 and Harrison died in 2001.

• Lived: 1960 CE – 1970 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: musician