Getting Better: The Beatles and the Angry Young Men

Abstract

“Me used to be angry young man,” sang Paul McCartney in “Getting Better,” evoking the literary and artistic movement that—along with rock ‘n’ roll—swept across Great Britain in 1956. Though largely supplanted by the British satire boom of the 1960s, the Angry Young Men’s (AYM) Anglophone existentialism resonated through the Beatles’ golden decade, patterning their evolution from cheery pop stars to socially conscious rock poets. While the Beatles never acknowledged any direct influence by the AYM, the band’s post-1966 turn toward avant-garde experimentalism and darker lyrical subject matter bears the imprint of central AYM figures such as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Braine. This essay traces the AYM’s indirect influence on the Beatles, recounting how teenaged John, Paul, George, and Ringo would have experienced the Angry Young Men in 1950s Liverpool. As Humphrey Carpenter has written, the AYM—in their disgust at the “worn out and conservative mores of the society in which they found themselves”—established the keynote of the 1960s satirists, whose tone and style the Beatles increasingly adopted. Though conventionally credited with having created the hippie ethic of the 1960s, the Beatles were just as much a musical, artistic, and cultural product of the “angry decade” of the 1950s.