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Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When Paul McCartney was joined on stage in London by Ringo Starr at the final concert of his Got Back tour last week, they easily slipped into songs like “Helter Skelter” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They’ve had time to practice: it’s been 64 years since they first performed as The Beatles with John Lennon and George Harrison.
McCartney is 82, more than four times his age when he was 18 at the time. But the remaining members of the Beatles continued playing long after the deaths of Harrison and Lennon. They formed one half of the most successful musical group of all time and the one that took rock and roll from its American roots to unleash the modern British music business.
The latter is also still thriving, dwarfing other domestic industries that have declined since the 1960s. The growth of British recorded music exports slowed down However, it still reached record levels last year and the industry is estimated to have contributed £7.6 billion to the economy in 2023. Singers like Adele and Ed Sheeran have followed The Beatles’ path to worldwide fame.
There’s a lot of competition, and South Korean bands like Stray Kids are becoming successful around the world, but the distinctive virtues of British music have been passed down through generations, from the Beatles to Arctic Monkeys, Dua Lipa and Lewis Capaldi. At the end of the year, it’s worth reflecting on this success.
Of course, the English language always helped. The fact that the Beatles wrote and sang songs in English not only helped them invade the United States, but was also part of their marketing. It would have been harder to charm the Ed Sullivan Show audience in 1964 if they had needed a translator.
But there was creativity behind the language. 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 very familiar with the musical forms and conventions, just as the Rolling Stones were with the blues. They added an innate playfulness and wit.
The distance was also useful. Ian Leslie, author of John and Paula forthcoming biography of Lennon and McCartney argues that their simultaneous devotion to and distance from the United States allowed them creative freedom. “They took American music and sold it back to Americans. . . They loved to turn it around, change it, mix it up,” he says.
They come from a tradition of wordplay and humor that goes back to Shakespeare. It was also a product of education, particularly the art schools that many songwriters attended, from Lennon to Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, David Bowie and The Clash’s Joe Strummer. Adele and Amy Winehouse both attended the industry-supported Brit School for Performing Arts in Croydon.
The British music business then benefited from an agglomeration effect: when it became clear that an exceptionally bright quartet of working-class Liverpudlians could break through onto the world stage, others naturally sought to follow. With a sustained group of artists forming the core of the industry, Britain emerged as a music cluster.
This cluster was supported by postwar immigration. Ska originated in Jamaica but was revived in the 1970s by bands like The Specials, while grime, a London mix of forms, gave birth to artists like Stormzy. Immigration is also an important element of the British jazz revival and has helped maintain the industry’s healthy level of social mobility.
British music faces challenges today. The careers of top music artists are remarkably long-lived in the age of global tours and extended residencies, such as Adele’s Las Vegas residency, which ended in November. But McCartney is aging, just like the Stones and Elton John’s farewell tour extrapolated $939 million. The UK has a great back catalog but needs to constantly renew it.
Global competition is intense. American Taylor Swift is the world’s highest-grossing artist and there is no British band in the IFPI trade group’s top 10 for 2023. The new music invasion comes from South Korea, with Seventeen, Stray Kids, Tomorrow X Together and NewJeans in the charts. There are other difficulties, including post-Brexit obstacles to European touring.
But the UK remains the third largest music market in the world and the fact that others are successfully competing for fans’ attention (now more in their own languages) is not evidence of failure. It simply means that they have learned what can be achieved. The Beatles and others showed that music was not a distraction from art school but a global business.
Britain still has that spirit of creativity and musical ingenuity, although its economic future is less clear than it was in the early 1960s. If the government values this creative asset and helps it thrive, the band will keep playing.
