The
Beatles
The Beatles were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. They were from Liverpool. Two years after their first record in 1962, they were the most famous group in the world: in March 1964, Beatles' records had the top five places in the US charts. The whole world seemed to go crazy about the Beatles: not just about their music, but about their clothes, their hair, the way they talked. Their music was full of a new kind of energy and Lennon and McCartney wrote great songs, always trying to do new things.
Between 1963 and 1969, the Beatles had eighteen number one hits in the UK. But they stopped playing in front of people in 1966. After that they only made records. Then they started to disagree, and they stopped working together completely in 1970. In 1980, a man killed John Lennon in a street in New York, so the Beatles can never play a concert together again. But the Beatles' music will always live. The Beatles gave something new and exciting to pop.
Steve Flinders: Forty Years Of Pop; Oxford University Press, 1996 (2001), page 6 f.