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

Inglis, Ian (2010) “I Read the News Today, Oh Boy”: The British Press and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 33 (4). pp. 549-562. ISSN 0300-7766

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	V300 History by topic W300 Music
Department:	Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Design
Depositing User:	Users 6424 not found.
Date Deposited:	22 Oct 2013 14:55
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2019 19:41
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/14213

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