From cheeky mop tops to long-haired holy men: The Beatles come of age in America

In his latest book, the veteran pop commentator David Hepworth is concerned with satisfaction, its acquisition and maintenance. On record, satisfaction was something the Rolling Stones found notoriously hard to get — ‘an itch you could never quite scratch’. In reality, it was a commodity the groups spearheading the British invasion of the 1960s — the Stones, the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five and others — discovered to be plentiful in the USA. And as Hepworth notes, it was ‘Satisfaction’ itself, a huge hit in America, which delivered the very thing Mick Jagger bemoaned the lack of in the song. In the recollection of Herman’s Hermits singer Peter Noone:

We had just done ‘I’m Henry VIII, I Am’ [the music hall standard and another huge US hit, horrifyingly] on The Ed Sullivan Show and there were 3,000 kids outside the hotel waiting for us. It must have made an impact on the Stones because they started writing pop tunes. No more of the blues stuff.

‘All these young men,’ writes Hepworth, ‘came from a country that at the time believed a taste for luxury or convenience was a harbinger of inevitable moral decline.’ Reciprocally, the long-haired beat groups who rampaged through America, hailing from hitherto obscure British cities with olde-worlde names such as Liverpool and Birmingham, represented an assault on public decency:

The time off was like an unsupervised school trip for horny young adults, financed from a bottomless Exchequer. The work part, the bit that might be a chore back in the UK, was suddenly hugely exciting once you did it in the place you were soon referring to, to the considerable annoyance of your friends back in England, as ‘Stateside’. Even meals were a source of wonder. Legend has it that on being introduced to pizza, Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne excitedly let friends back home know: ‘There’s a new food!’