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When Paul McCartney was joined on stage in London by Ringo Starr for the final concert in his Got Back tour last week, they slipped easily into songs, including “Helter Skelter” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. They have had time to practice: it’s 64 years since they first started playing as The Beatles with John Lennon and George Harrison.
McCartney is 82, more than four times the age of the 18-year-old then. Yet The Beatles’ remaining members play on, long after the deaths of Harrison and Lennon. They formed half of the best-selling music act of all time and the one that seized rock and roll from its American roots to unleash the modern British music business.
The latter is also still going strong, putting to shame other domestic industries that have faded since the 1960s. The growth of UK recorded music exports slowed last year but it still reached a record level and the industry is estimated to have contributed £7.6bn to the economy in 2023. Singers such as Adele and Ed Sheeran have followed the path of The Beatles to global fame.
There is plenty of competition, with South Korean bands such as Stray Kids becoming globally successful, but the distinctive advantages of British music have been passed down through generations, from The Beatles to Arctic Monkeys, Dua Lipa and Lewis Capaldi. As the year ends, it is worth reflecting on this achievement.
The English language always helped, of course. The fact that The Beatles wrote and sang songs in English not only helped them to invade the US, but was part of the marketing. It would have been harder to charm the audience on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 if they had needed a translator.
But behind language lay creativity. Rock and roll was American but The Beatles and the bands that followed took the genre and gave it a British twist. Lennon and McCartney were well versed in the musical forms and conventions, as were the Rolling Stones with the blues. They added a native playfulness and wit.
Distance was also useful. Ian Leslie, author of John and Paul, a forthcoming biography of Lennon and McCartney, argues that their simultaneous devotion to, and detachment from, the US allowed them creative freedom. “They took American music and sold it back to Americans . . . They loved to invert it, to change it, to mess it up,” he says.
They came from a tradition of wordplay and humour going back to Shakespeare. It was also a product of education, notably the art schools through which many songwriters passed, from Lennon to Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, David Bowie and Joe Strummer of the Clash. Adele and Amy Winehouse both attended the industry-backed Brit School for performing arts in Croydon.
The UK music business then gained from an agglomeration effect: when it became clear that one exceptionally bright quartet of working-class Liverpudlians could break on to the world stage, others naturally aspired to follow. Once a sustainable set of performers had formed the industry’s core, the UK became a musical cluster.
That cluster was aided by postwar immigration. Ska originated in Jamaica but was revived by bands such as The Specials in the 1970s while grime, a London amalgam of various forms, has produced artists including Stormzy. Immigration is also an important element of the British jazz revival, and has helped to sustain the industry’s salutary degree of social mobility.
UK music has challenges today. The careers of top musical artists have remarkable longevity in the era of global tours and prolonged residencies, such as Adele’s stint in Las Vegas that ended in November. But McCartney is ageing and so are the Stones and Elton John, whose farewell tour grossed $939mn. The UK has a great back catalogue but must keep renewing it.
Global competition is intense. America’s Taylor Swift is the top grossing artist in the world and no UK band figured in the 2023 top 10 compiled by the IFPI trade group. The new music invasion has come from South Korea, with Seventeen, Stray Kids, Tomorrow X Together and NewJeans all in that chart. There are other difficulties, including post-Brexit barriers to European tours.
But the UK remains the world’s third largest music market and the fact that others compete effectively for the attention of fans (more now in their own languages) is not proof of failure. It just means they have learnt what can be achieved. The Beatles and others showed that music was not an art school distraction: it was a global business.
Britain still has that spirit of creativity and musical invention, although its economic future is less clear than in the early 1960s. If the government values this creative asset and helps it to thrive, the band will play on.
john.gapper@ft.com