14 December 2014
Newsdesk
UK music acts such as One Direction storming the US charts is normal today – but a University of Derby author’s new book reveals how The Beatles were the first to ‘break America’.
Before the ‘Fab Four’ landed on American shores, in February 1964, only two British acts had topped the prestigious US Billboard singles chart. Between then and 1970 – just six years – top British acts such as The Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, the Kinks, The Hollies, The Yardbirds and The Who would get more than 130 of their songs in the American Top 40 chart.
British Invasion: The Crosscurrents of Musical Influence – by Simon Philo, University Programme Leader for American Studies – looks at how these and other pioneering British bands reversed the largely one-way flow of music, from America to the UK, and the wider cultural impact of this. The 204 page book, published by Rowman & Littlefield, is out now in hardback, price £27.95, and as a similarly priced e-book.
Simon said: “It’s accepted today that British musicians can go to America and make a splash, competing with American acts on their home turf, but it took arguably our most famous musical export to do it first.
“My book tracks the fascinating journey of 1960s British pop, from peripheral irrelevance through exotic novelty and into the very heart of the cultural mainstream. It documents a distinctive chapter in the story of Anglo-American relations which helped define the Sixties.”
The book is written in an accessible way, designed to appeal to anyone with a general interest in the history of pop music as well as students and academics. Library Journal called it a “fresh .. appealing .. popular social history.”
Simon’s previous books and essays have looked at punk rock culture, hit animation series The Simpsons and trans-Atlantic cinema, among other subjects.
For more information about American Studies courses – based within the College of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Derby – see website www.derby.ac.uk/lhss/humanities/american-studies
