Beatles-mania

4 april 1964

On this day, no fewer than five songs by The Beatles were at the top of the charts. Admittedly, this was the American charts, but as it was an English pop group, I believe it is acceptable to mention it here.

These are: ‘Please Please Me’ (5); ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ (4); ‘She Loves You’ (3); ‘Twist and Shout’ (2); ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ (1). ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘She Loves You’ had previously been at number 1 since early February. Throughout the entire months of February, March, and April, and the first week of May, the Beatles held the top spot. That same year, three more number 1 singles followed: ‘Love Me Do’, ‘A Hard’s Day Night’, and ‘I Feel Fine’. In total, the Beatles spent eighteen weeks at number 1 during that year. These are all records that have never been broken.

American Beatle mania began in early February with the group’s first visit to the United States. More than a month earlier, the first Beatle single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, had been released in the United States. The craze only really took hold after their arrival in New York on February 9.

Three thousand screaming fans welcomed the Beatles. Two days later, The Beatles performed for twenty thousand screaming fans at The Coliseum in Washington. That evening, they were on television during the Ed Sullivan Show. An estimated 73 million Americans watched the show, or forty percent of the population. Many bought the available singles the next day.

Naturally, there was a Beatles mania in other countries as well. In the United Kingdom, The Beatles had actually broken through the previous year. It led to a cultural liberation. The English poet Philip Larkin describes this in his poem Annus Mirabilis, the first lines of which read as follows:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

During the first week of April, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ also occupied the number one spot on the charts in the United Kingdom. However, it was the only Beatles song in the Top Fifty, which otherwise included songs by Roy Orbison, Doris Day, Cilla Black, and Cliff Richards. I looked at the entire list and knew at least half of the songs, even though this was well over a year before I was born. I looked at this week’s list and didn’t know a single one. Yes, I am getting older.

Incidentally, when I was born, The Beatles were at number 1 in the Netherlands with the song Help, which I have always found telling. In the first week of this April, however, the top spot was taken by the Belgian singer Adamo with the song ‘Vous Permittez, Monsieur’ .

The song is from the good old days, where a young man asks a father if he may dance with his daughter. When the father looks somewhat skeptical, the young man assures him that he will behave properly—at least just as properly as the father had done back when he met the girl’s mother.

That does not detract from the fact that I have the feeling that the cultural revolution initiated by The Beatles had not yet begun in the Netherlands in early April; ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was only at number 2. However, this soon changed. In early June of 1964, The Beatles came to the Netherlands for their first concert.