Music Folks
The Beatles: The Liverpool Four Who Rewrote the Rules of Pop
October 22, 2026 · by Music Folks
The Beatles were four young men from Liverpool who turned a skiffle group into the most influential band in popular music. Between 1962 and 1970 John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr changed what a pop single, an album and a recording studio could be, and their records still sit at the center of almost every conversation about rock history.
Quick Facts
- Formed: Liverpool, England (the group grew out of Lennon's Quarrymen, around 1960)
- Members: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr
- Genre: Rock, pop, psychedelia
- Key albums: Please Please Me (1963), Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles (the “White Album,” 1968), Abbey Road (1969)
- Awards: Nine Grammys, an Academy Award for the film Let It Be (1970), and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988
- Split: 1970
From Skiffle to Hamburg
Lennon's school-days group, the Quarrymen, grew into a band that played rough, exhausting club residencies in Hamburg, West Germany, between 1960 and 1962, and then at Liverpool's Cavern Club. Brian Epstein saw them there in November 1961 and became their manager in January 1962. Producer George Martin signed them to EMI's Parlophone label, and in August 1962 Ringo Starr replaced Pete Best on drums.
Beatlemania
“Love Me Do” was the first hit in late 1962, and the album Please Please Me reached No. 1 the following year. By early 1964 “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had gone to No. 1 in the United States, and the band's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that February drew an audience estimated at around 73 million. The films A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), both directed by Richard Lester, turned the group's quick humor into part of the legend.
The Studio Years
The band played its last commercial concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966. From then on the studio was their instrument. Rubber Soul and Revolver widened the sound of pop, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) became a cultural landmark, and the sprawling White Album followed in 1968. That same year they founded Apple Corps, a multimedia company that still looks after the band's legacy. Abbey Road arrived in 1969, and the group broke up in 1970.
Records and Legacy
Estimates put the band's sales at more than 600 million units. They hold the record for the most No. 1 singles (20) and No. 1 albums (19) on the Billboard charts in the United States, and the most singles sold in the UK. Each member went on to a solo career, and Lennon's own story is told in our John Lennon profile.
The story had one more chapter. Lennon recorded a rough piano demo of “Now and Then” in the late 1970s, and the band looked at it again during the Anthology project in the 1990s but set it aside. Using audio restoration developed for the film The Beatles: Get Back, Peter Jackson's team separated Lennon's voice from the piano, and McCartney and Starr finished the track, adding Harrison's guitar parts from 1995. It was released on November 2, 2023, reached No. 1 in the UK and won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance at the 2025 ceremony.
Lennon died in 1980 and Harrison in 2001. As of October 2026, McCartney and Starr are still making music, and the Beatles' catalog is still among the most played and studied in the world.