Britain Invades the World

Before 1964, America’s worldwide domination of the pop music industry — and youth culture in general — was virtually total.

Few British artists made much of an impression overseas, and those that did manage to penetrate foreign markets were little more than imitations of American sounds and styles.

In 1963, British acts failed to achieve a single Billboard Top 50 placing, although Rolf Harris, a UK-based Australian, reached #3 with thé novelty Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport. By the following year, however, the tables had turned full circle.

At the beginning of February 1964, The Beatles hit the #1 spot in the Hot Hundred with I Want To Hold Your Hand and America’s position on the throne of rock’n’roll was seriously threatened.

The Beatles had five more US chart-toppers in 1964, and the nation’s teen consumers squandered increasing amounts of money on items such as Beatle wigs, Beatle boots, Beatle stockings, talcum powder, wallpaper, hats, sweaters, chewing gum, cakes, ice-cream and bubble-bath.

The Beatles could do no wrong, and their fellow countrymen were taken to heart with fervour; The Animals, Manfred Mann and Peter and Gordon also made the #1 spot, while The Zombies, The Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Chad and Jeremy, The Honeycombs, Dusty Springfield and even The Bachelors gained Top Ten hits.

With the US market so tightly in its grip, the UK could now conquer the world.

American anglophiles

In 1966, Victor “Moulty” Moulten, the one-handed drummer of New England beat group The Barbarians, was quoted as saying,

“We hate 14-year-old girls from the Bronx who go to the mod shops and say ‘What can we get that’s English to walk around the village in today?’ And at eleven they have to take off their John Lennon hats and go home.”

Anglophilia had taken over American popular culture, its music and its fashion scene; and despite Moulty’s apparent loathing of the craze for all things English,

The Barbarians were just one of the hundreds of US groups who modelled their sound and image on British bands.

Although they wore leather sandals rather than the by-now requisite Beatle boots, the group were, in all other respects, nothing more than Anglo pretenders. They sported Rolling Stones-style haircuts, covered numbers such as The Animals‘ House Of The Rising Sun and their first hit, Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl? (released in June 1965), contained many a reference to Liverpool.

This desire to copy the new approach which was being imported from the UK was evident in the work of almost every US rock band of the mid-sixties.

Some went on to develop distinctive styles of their own, like The Byrds, whose leader, Roger McGuinn, was inspired to switch from folk to rock after seeing The Beatles’ 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night.

Many more, however, remained pale imitations of British originals.

New Jersey’s Knickerbockers, whose Lies became a US Top Twenty hit towards the end of 1965, managed to sound more like The Beatles than The Beatles themselves, while San Francisco’s Chocolate Watch Band were Rolling Stones impostors.

Their producer Ed Cobb later confessed:

“They started out as a Rolling Stones copy in order to make money. They played at dances and stuff like that. Then Bill [Henry] got into the role of the Stones copy so much that he took on being Mick Jagger. He believed that he was the original and Jagger was the copy!”

The US groups’ attempts to sound English often bordered on the ridiculous.

The Bugs (a name meant to draw attention through its connection with beetles) adopted heavily exaggerated Liverpudlian accents on their 1965 local Texas hit Pretty Girl – and the effect was absurd.

The Turtles, on the other hand, tried to fool their audience by billing themselves, in the early days, as “The Turtles From England”.

They even acquired work through posing as Englishmen, as singer Mark Volman later recalled: “We used to go to bowling alleys and order tea with plenty of milk and tell them we were Gerry and the Pacemakers.”

By the middle of the decade, almost every corner of the Western world had become obsessed by the British beat and the look of London and Liverpool.

In Australia, I Want To Hold Your Hand hit the top of the charts in January 1964. Six months later, 300,000 people turned out in the streets of Adelaide to welcome The Beatles. With Beatlemania on the rampage, Australian radio, TV and record companies became increasingly hesitant to entertain home-grown talent.

They looked to the UK for revenue, so antipodean bands had to struggle for recognition. Groups like Ray Brown and the Whispers – strict Merseybeat impersonators right down to the matching suits and ties — and The Missing Links, who plundered the music and fashion catalogues of the Stones, The Yardbirds and The Pretty Things, achieved minor success.

Only The Easybeats (pictured below), who started out with a residency at Sydney’s Beatle Village, broke through to international fame with a considerably less derivative repertoire.

The musically ambitious youth of Canada suffered similar media prejudice.

Canadian radio shut its doors to home talent, while record companies such as Capitol-Canada — which acquired the services of The Beatles, The Dave Clark Five, The Yardbirds, The Hollies and other British bands — just didn’t want to know.

When Toronto band Ritchie Knight and the Mid-Knights (pictured) presented their (independently pressed) records to CHUM-AM, the city’s major rock station, the DJs not only refused to play them, but also smashed the records before the group’s eyes.

This was, however, an unusually extreme reaction. Even so, only British groups, or the occasional out-and-out Beatles copyists (such as Ottawa’s Staccatos, Montreal’s J.B. and the Playboys or Toronto’s Lords of London), were acceptable.

Europe, too, had a multitude of imitators. In Sweden, for instance, the appearance of The Beatles had sparked off a reaction against the stagnant music scene. By the mid-sixties, hundreds of groups had appeared, echoing the noise from across the sea.

Among the most popular were The Tages (pictured above) — voted ‘The Beatles of Sweden’ in 1963 — and Ola and the Janglers, who relied almost exclusively on English material such as The Zombies‘ She’s Not There, and The Kinks‘ Stop Your Sobbing.

Some of the Swedish bands went so far as to borrow names from English groups – The Gonks and Steampacket, for example — and such was the demand for British beat that many British bands unknown in their homeland were able to move to Sweden and pursue lucrative careers – The Deejays, The Red Squares, The Renegades and others.

Germany’s British mimics included The Rattles (pictured below), The Rivets, The Hi Fis, and The Rollicks, while in Spain groups such as Los Brincos (who sported a striped version of the Beatles’ jacket), Grupo 15 (whose recordings included The Beatles’ Michelle and Girl and The Kinks’ Dandy) and Lone Star (who hit with their version of the Stones’ Satisfaction) were in the forefront of Latin anglo infatuation.

The UK craze even got to Mexico — Los Rockin’ Devils’ debut single was Juego De Amor (Wayne Fontana‘s Game Of Love), while their first album, Exitos A Go Go, included Yo Soy Enrique V Ill (Herman’s Hermits‘ I’m Henry VIII I Am) and Toda El Dia Y Toda La Noche (The Kinks’ All Day And All Of The Night).

Los X-5’s album, Al Compás de la Nueva Ola, featured three Beatles songs and three Dave Clark Five numbers, while Los Freddys were Mexico’s answer to London’s burgeoning R&B scene.

Carnaby chic

The global fad for British fashion and music proved to be much more than just another passing phase. Before the obsession could flag, the mod scene — centred on Carnaby Street, Swinging London, and groups like The Who and the Small Faces — arrived to bolster the cause.

By 1966, the associated styles and trends were being reflected increasingly in the media worldwide.

The British female ‘look’ — mini-skirt, long, straight hair, and wide-eyed loveliness — was making international celebrities of models such as Jean Shrimpton and Pattie Boyd (pictured at right) – whose fame was enhanced, in 1966, by her marriage to George Harrison.

Such was the appeal of the London dollies that US teen-fashion magazine 16 recruited Pattie to contribute a monthly column, entitled Letter From London.

She reported on the latest trends in Carnaby Street, told readers what the Beatles and Stones were wearing at the moment, and advised how to turn dark, curly hair straight and blonde.

Britain was also exhibiting a marked influence on the hitherto US-dominated cinema industry.

1964 had been a golden year for the British movie trade. Oscars had been awarded to Rex Harrison (for My Fair Lady) and Julie Andrews (for Mary Poppins), while the year’s biggest box-office money-spinners had included Becket, starring Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, The Pink Panther, with Peter Sellers and David Niven, The Servant, with Dirk Bogarde and James Fox, and the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love.

And there was A Hard Day’s Night, which many critics suggested was the first viewable pop film and proved to be the kiss of death for the American beach party flick.

Even Elvis Presley responded on celluloid to the British threat when, in 1967, he appeared in his twenty-fourth film, Double Trouble.

“Elvis takes mad, mod Europe by song as he swings into a brand new adventure, filled with dames, diamonds and danger!” proclaimed the movie posters.

As the publicity angle suggested, the film was a belated concession to the British invasion, featuring Elvis as a singer in a London nightclub backed by a group called The G Men, who did their best to look like The Beatles.

Meanwhile, British style was the selling point of such US television adventure series as The Man From UNCLE (which began its first run in 1964) and its sequel, two years later, The Girl From UNCLE.

These borrowed heavily from the James Bond films and the British TV series The Avengers.

1967, however, the United States had come back into its own – The Monkees, with their reintroduction of teenybop idolatry, had become international properties, and the psychedelic age had given birth to a host of US groups – the Grateful Dead, Spirit, Love, Moby Grape and the Electric Prunes, to name but a few — who no longer depended on Britain for inspiration.

Fashion was no longer dictated by Carnaby Street but by the hippies along Haight-Ashbury — bells, beads and kaftans had put an end to blazers and Chelsea boots. But although the United States had regained a musical and youth cultural identity of its own, it would never again recapture its global domination of the rock market.