The Beatles Music Videos

English rock band · 1960–1970

The English rock band that rewrote what popular music could be. Formed in Liverpool in 1960, the Beatles released Love Me Do in October 1962, then spent the next year turning Please Please Me and She Loves You into a British mania. I Want to Hold Your Hand gave them their first American No.1 in February 1964, the month they played The Ed Sullivan Show. Two years later they left the road for the studio, and Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles and Abbey Road changed what a rock record could sound like. No Beatle plays an instrument on Eleanor Rigby, and Strawberry Fields Forever was spliced together from two takes recorded in different keys and tempos.

George Harrison wrote two of the catalog's best-loved songs, Something and Here Comes the Sun, for Abbey Road, the last album the four recorded together; Let It Be followed in May 1970, a month after the split became public. They hold the record for Billboard Hot 100 No.1s with twenty, and Hey Jude held the top spot for nine weeks in 1968. John Lennon was killed in New York in December 1980, and Harrison died in November 2001. The band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and remain the best-selling act in history, with sales estimated at 600 million units. In November 2023, Now and Then, built from a Lennon demo, took them back to No.1 in Britain, sixty-one years after their first single.