Beat Music
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The national British guitar-group style that generalised Merseybeat beyond Liverpool: four- or five-piece line-ups playing a steady, unswung four-to-the-bar pulse with prominent backbeat, jangling rhythm guitar, walking or root-driven bass, and short blues-derived solos kept firmly subordinate to the vocal. Arrangements are terse and hook-led, frequently with a minor-key verse resolving to a major chorus, layered harmony vocals, and — as the style matured — Hammond organ, twelve-string guitar and harmonica broadening the palette toward folk-rock and freakbeat.
History
Beat emerged as regional scenes across Britain absorbed American rock'n'roll, Chuck Berry and Brill Building pop through skiffle, then hardened into professional club circuits in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London, with a formative apprenticeship for many groups in the marathon residencies of Hamburg's Reeperbahn clubs. Between 1963 and 1965 the format swept the British charts and then, as the "British Invasion", the American ones, with The Beatles, The Dave Clark Five, The Hollies and Herman's Hermits reversing the transatlantic flow of popular music for the first time. From 1965 the style fragmented productively: The Zombies and The Kinks pushed toward harmonic sophistication and social observation, others toward the R&B-heavy freakbeat that fed psychedelia, and by 1967 the album had displaced the two-minute single as the ambitious group's medium — but beat's core template of a self-contained band writing its own material remains the foundational model of the rock group.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- She Loves You(1963) — The BeatlesSpotifyYouTube
- Bus Stop(1966) — The HolliesSpotifyYouTube
- Glad All Over(1963) — The Dave Clark FiveSpotifyYouTube
- I'm into Something Good(1964) — Herman's HermitsSpotifyYouTube
- She's Not There(1964) — The ZombiesSpotifyYouTube
- Needles and Pins(1964) — The SearchersSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Ian MacDonald, "Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties", Fourth Estate, 1994
- Jon Savage, "1966: The Year the Decade Exploded", Faber & Faber, 2015
- Richie Unterberger, "Unknown Legends of Rock 'n' Roll", Backbeat Books