Beat music, British beat, or Merseybeat is a British popular music

genre Genre () is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other f ...

that developed, particularly in and around

Liverpool Liverpool is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the List of English districts by population, 10th largest English district by population and its E ...

, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The genre melded influences from

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

rock and roll Rock and roll (often written as rock & roll, rock 'n' roll, or rock 'n roll) is a genre of popular music that evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It originated from African-American music such as jazz, rhythm ...

rhythm and blues Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated in African-American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly ...

skiffle Skiffle is a genre of folk music with influences from American folk music, blues, country, bluegrass, and jazz, generally performed with a mixture of manufactured and homemade or improvised instruments. Originating as a form in the United Stat ...

, traditional pop and music hall. It rose to mainstream popularity in the UK and Europe by 1963 before spreading to the

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and th ...

in 1964 with the

British Invasion The British Invasion was a cultural phenomenon of the mid-1960s, when rock and pop music acts from the United Kingdom and other aspects of British culture became popular in the United States and significant to the rising "counterculture" o ...

. The beat style had a significant impact on popular music and youth culture, from 1960s movements such as garage rock, folk rock and psychedelic music to 1970s punk rock and 1990s Britpop.

Origin

The exact origins of the terms 'beat music' and 'Merseybeat' are uncertain. The "beat" in each, however, derived from the driving

rhythm Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular re ...

s which the bands had adopted from their rock and roll, R&B and soul music influences, rather than the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s. As the initial wave of rock and roll subsided in the later 1950s, "big beat" music, later shortened to "beat", became a live dance alternative to the balladeers like Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, and

Cliff Richard Sir Cliff Richard (born Harry Rodger Webb; 14 October 1940) is an Indian-born British musican, singer, producer, entrepreneur and philanthropist who holds both British and Barbadian citizenship. He has total sales of over 21.5 million ...

who were dominating the charts.B. Longhurst, ''Popular Music and Society'' (Polity, 2nd edn., 2007), , p. 98. The German anthropologist and music critic

Ernest Borneman Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann (12 April 1915 – 4 June 1995), also known by his self-chosen anglicisation Ernest Borneman, was a German crime writer, filmmaker, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, psychoanalyst, sexologist, communist agitator, ...

, who lived in England from 1933 to 1960, claimed to have coined the term in a column in ''Melody Maker'' magazine to describe the British imitation of American rock'n'roll, rhythm & blues and skiffle bands. The name '' Mersey Beat'' was used for a Liverpool music magazine founded in 1961 by Bill Harry. Harry claims to have coined the term "based on a policeman's beat and not that of the music". The band the Pacifics were renamed the Mersey Beats in February 1962 by Bob Wooler, MC at the Cavern Club, and in April that year they became the Merseybeats. With the rise of

the Beatles The Beatles were an English Rock music, rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, that comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are regarded as the Cultural impact of the Beatles, most influential band of al ...

in 1963, the terms Mersey sound and Merseybeat were applied to bands and singers from Liverpool, the first time in British pop music that a sound and a location were linked together. The equivalent scenes in Birmingham and London were described as Brum beat and the

Tottenham Tottenham () is a town in North London, England, within the London Borough of Haringey. It is located in the ceremonial county of Greater London. Tottenham is centred north-northeast of Charing Cross, bordering Edmonton to the north, Wal ...

Sound respectively.

Characteristics

The most distinctive characteristic of beat music was its strong beat, using the backbeat common to

and

, but often with a driving emphasis on all the beats of 4/4 bar. The rhythm itself—described by Alan Clayson as "a changeless four-four offbeat on the snare drum"—was developed in the clubs in Hamburg, West Germany, where many English groups, including the Beatles, performed in the early 1960s and where it was known as the ''mach schau'' (make show) beat. The 8/8 rhythm was flexible enough to be adopted for songs from a range of genres. In addition, according to music writer Dave Laing,

" e chord playing of the rhythm guitar was broken up into a series of separate strokes, often one to the bar, with the regular plodding of the bass guitar and crisp drumming behind it. This gave a very different effect from the monolithic character of rock, in that the beat was given not by the duplication of one instrument in the rhythm section by another, but by an interplay between all three. This flexibility also meant that beat music could cope with a greater range of time-signatures and song shapes than rock & roll had been able to".

Beat groups usually had simple

guitar The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected string ...

-dominated line-ups, with vocal

harmonies In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches ( tones, notes), or chords. Howev ...

and catchy tunes. The most common instrumentation of beat groups featured lead, rhythm and bass guitars plus drums, as popularized by

, the Searchers, and others. Beat groups—even those with a separate lead singer—often sang both verses and choruses in close harmony, resembling doo wop, with nonsense syllables in the backing vocals.

Emergence

In the late 1950s, a flourishing culture of groups began to emerge, often out of the declining

scene, in major urban centres in the UK like Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London. This was particularly true in Liverpool, where it has been estimated that there were around 350 different bands active, often playing ballrooms, concert halls and clubs. Liverpool was perhaps uniquely placed within Britain to be the point of origin of a new form of music. Commentators have pointed to a combination of local solidarity,

industrial decline Deindustrialization is a process of social and economic change caused by the removal or reduction of industrial capacity or activity in a country or region, especially of heavy industry or manufacturing industry. There are different interpre ...

, social deprivation, and the existence of a large population of Irish origin, the influence of which has been detected in Beat music. It was also a major port with links to America, particularly through the

Cunard Yanks The Cunard Yanks (also known as the Boat Boys or Hollywood Boys) were the young working class British male Cunard Line household crew, who worked on the transatlantic shipping routes from Liverpool to New York and Montreal, from the late 1940s to t ...

, which made for much greater access to American records and instruments like guitars, which could not easily be imported due to trade restrictions.R. Stakes, "Those boys: the rise of Mersey beat", in S. Wade, ed., ''Gladsongs and Gatherings: Poetry and its Social Context in Liverpool Since the 1960s'' (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), , pp. 157–66. As a result, Beat bands were heavily influenced by American groups of the era, such as

Buddy Holly and the Crickets The Crickets were an American rock and roll band from Lubbock, Texas, formed by singer-songwriter Buddy Holly in January 1957. Their first hit record, "That'll Be the Day", released in May 1957, peaked at number three on the ''Billboard'' Top ...

(from which group the Beatles derived their name, combining it with a pun on the beat in their music), and to a lesser extent by

British rock and roll British rock and roll, or sometimes British rock 'n' roll, is a style of popular music based on American rock and roll, which emerged in the late 1950s and was popular until the arrival of beat music in 1962. It was important in establishing Bri ...

groups such as the Shadows. After the national success of the Beatles in Britain from 1962, a number of Liverpool performers were able to follow them into the charts, including Gerry & The Pacemakers (who achieved a number one hit in the UK before the Beatles), the Searchers, and Cilla Black. Outside of Liverpool many local scenes were less influenced by rock and roll and more by the

and later directly by the blues. These included bands from Birmingham who were often grouped with the beat movement, the most successful being the Spencer Davis Group and the Moody Blues. Similar blues influenced bands who broke out from local scenes to national prominence were the Animals from Newcastle and

Them Them or THEM, a third-person plural accusative personal pronoun, may refer to: Books * ''Them'' (novel), 3rd volume (1969) in American Joyce Carol Oates' ''Wonderland Quartet'' * '' Them: Adventures with Extremists'', 2003 non-fiction by Wels ...

from

Belfast Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingdom ...

. From London, the term ''Tottenham Sound'' was largely based around the Dave Clark Five, but other London-based British rhythm and blues and rock bands who benefited from the beat boom of this era included

the Rolling Stones The Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for six decades, they are one of the most popular and enduring bands of the rock era. In the early 1960s, the Rolling Stones pioneered the gritty, rhythmically dr ...

, the Kinks and

the Yardbirds The Yardbirds are an English rock band, formed in London in 1963. The band's core lineup featured vocalist and harmonica player Keith Relf, drummer Jim McCarty, rhythm guitarist and later bassist Chris Dreja and bassist/producer Paul Samwe ...

British Invasion

The Beatles' appearance on '' The Ed Sullivan Show'' soon after led to chart success. During the next two years, the Animals, Petula Clark, the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, Donovan, Peter and Gordon,

Manfred Mann Manfred Mann were an English rock band, formed in London and active between 1962 and 1969. The group were named after their keyboardist Manfred Mann, who later led the successful 1970s group Manfred Mann's Earth Band. The band had two diffe ...

, Freddie and the Dreamers, The Zombies, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Herman’s Hermits, and the Troggs would have one or more number one singles in America.

Freakbeat

Freakbeat is a subgenre of

music developed mainly by harder-driving British groups, often those with a mod following during the

Swinging London The Swinging Sixties was a youth-driven cultural revolution that took place in the United Kingdom during the mid-to-late 1960s, emphasising modernity and fun-loving hedonism, with Swinging London as its centre. It saw a flourishing in art, mu ...

period of the mid to late 1960s. Freakbeat bridges "British Invasion mod/ R&B/pop and psychedelia". The term was coined by English music journalist

Phil Smee Philip Lloyd-Smee is an English music journalist, designer and record collector, most widely known for designing music album covers and his Bam-Caruso music label, best known for the Rubble series of albums. Much of Smee's design work was done f ...

. Allmusic writes that "freakbeat" is loosely defined, but generally describes the more obscure but hard-edged artists of the

era such as the Creation, the Pretty Things or

Denny Laine Denny Laine (born Brian Frederick Hines, 29 October 1944) is an English musician, singer, and songwriter, known as a founder of two major rock bands: the Moody Blues, with whom he played from 1964 to 1966, and Wings, with whom he played from 1 ...

's early solo work. Other bands often mentioned as Freakbeat are

the Action The Action were an English band of the 1960s, formed as the Boys in August 1963, in Kentish Town, North West London. They were part of the mod subculture, and played soul music-influenced pop music. Career The band was formed as the Boys in ...

, the Move, the Smoke, the Sorrows, and Wimple Winch.

Decline

By 1967, beat music was beginning to sound out of date, particularly compared with the "harder edged" blues rock that was beginning to emerge. Most of the groups that had not already disbanded by 1967, like the Beatles, moved into different forms of

rock music Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as " rock and roll" in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of different styles in the mid-1960s and later, particularly in the United States a ...

and

pop music Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form during the mid-1950s in the United States and the United Kingdom. The terms ''popular music'' and ''pop music'' are often used interchangeably, although the former descri ...

, including psychedelic rock and eventually

progressive rock Progressive rock (shortened as prog rock or simply prog; sometimes conflated with art rock) is a broad genre of rock music that developed in the United Kingdom and United States through the mid- to late 1960s, peaking in the early 1970s. I ...

Influence

Beat was a major influence on the American garage rockV. Bogdanov, C. Woodstra and S. T. Erlewine, ''All music guide to rock: the definitive guide to rock, pop, and soul'' (Backbeat Books, 3rd end., 2002), pp. 1320-1. and folk rock movements, and would be a source of inspiration for subsequent rock music subgenres, including Britpop in the 1990s.D. B. Scott, "The Britpop sound", in A. Bennett and J. Stratton, eds., ''Britpop and the English Music Tradition'' (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), , pp. 103-122.

Notes

References

* * Leigh, S., (2004) ''Twist and Shout!: Merseybeat, The Cavern, The Star-Club and The Beatles'' (Nirvana Books), (updated version of ''Let's Go Down to the Cavern'') * May, Chris & Phillips, Tim, ''British Beat'', Socion Books, London, ISBN 0 903985 01 2.

External links

Mersey Beat magazine, including history of genreMerseybeat Nostalgia
{{DEFAULTSORT:Beat Music 1960s in music 1950s in Liverpool 1960s in Liverpool 20th-century music genres British Invasion British music history British styles of music English styles of music Pop music genres British rock music genres The Beatles music