“I Read the News Today, Oh Boy”: The British Press and the Beatles

Abstract

The public arrival of the Beatles in 1963 brought unforeseen difficulties for journalists in the UK. Although there was an established weekly music press, centered around a quartet of titles, its writers had little practical experience of British performers whose popularity and success eclipsed that of their American contemporaries, and who actively sought to create a distinctive musical style of their own. However, the problem was even more acute for the country's national daily and weekly press: the traditional policy of regarding popular music as either an amusing and peripheral diversion or an incitement to delinquency and depravity left it ill-equipped to structure its coverage of a group whose personalities, behavior, and achievements transcended previous categorizations and blurred the distinction between news and entertainment. The decisions taken by the British press played a crucial role in shaping the early popularity of the Beatles, and also helped to establish a journalistic approach through which popular music became a legitimate and lucrative topic for newspapers in the UK.