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	The Beatles: The Pocket Essential Guide By: Charles, Paul Published By: Pocket Essentials ePub for Digital Editions Price: $9.99 PDF for Digital Editions Price: $9.99 Mobipocket Reader Price: $9.99 Microsoft Reader Price: $9.99 Available to read online in eb20 (what's this?) PDF for Digital EditionsePub for Digital EditionsMobipocket ReaderMicrosoft Reader	EBOOK OPTIONS ADD TO CART ADD TO WISHLIST TELL A FRIEND RECEIVE ALERTS
	The Beatles are the most successful entity in the history of the entertainment business ever! Fact! And it all didn’t happen by accident. Four working-class lads met up in and around Liverpool towards the end of the 1950s. They spent several years playing around Liverpool and in Hamburg fine tuning their band, performance and song writing before meeting up with Liverpool entrepreneur Brian Epstein and releasing their first album, Please Please Me, forty years ago today (publication day 23 March 2003). During the following ten years they broke every performance and sales record in the book, most notably in May 1964 each and every one of the top five singles in the American Billboard chart was theirs. On top of which they recorded, arguably, three of the best contemporary albums ever released. The Beatles were the soundtrack to the sixties. This Pocket Essential discusses how they met and, using the songs and records as signposts, takes you on a journey through their colourful, historic and celebrated career.

Excerpt

The thing about The Beatles is that here we are with this Pocket Essential publication, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of their first album Please Please Me, which was released on Friday 22nd March 1963, and globally it could be argued that they are now more popular than ever. A couple of Christmases ago, EMI put together all of the group’s number one singles on a compilation, came up with the innovative title of ‘1’ and it became the of the fastest selling albums of all time, moving over 23.5 million records in a matter of a month. It has now sold in excess of a phenomenal 35 million copies! I’m not sure that there are too many people around who don’t know The Beatles’ story; about how George Harrison, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney got together, met Brain Epstein and went on to fame and fortune. It’s been well documented in hundreds of books over the ensuing 40 years. So the intention here is not to dwell much on that side of things; instead we would like to concentrate on the official recorded works of their short career. On top of which, we’d like to try and shed some light on some of the reasons for their incredible success. Looking back, it’s very easy to say that The Beatles were a mega-group, the biggest and most popular group that the world has ever known. They broke numerous performance records and set standards, commercially and musically speaking, which I believe will never be bettered. But their success wasn’t an accident. The important thing in all of this wasn’t that they had so many hits because they were a big group; the reason they had so many hits was simply because they had great songs. I find it incredible that you could go out on the street and walk up to a stranger and mention a song title, any one of their 208 songs, and nine times out of ten the stranger would be able to make a passable stab at singing the melody. We’re not just talking about the twenty-two official singles here, or even their B-sides. Try it at your place of work or in the pub or at a dinner party. Even simpler than that, take a look at the list of their recorded titles at the back and see how many of them you can remember and/or sing. Let’s take a chronological trip through the fantastic adventure of The Beatles using their singles and albums as islands along the way and maybe with a few prompts here and there on the various songs, I might even be able to help you to remember some of the tunes in question. Without further ado…

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