The 1960s

Radio Luxembourg and the pirate stations fed the musical appetites of teenagers in the mid 60s. The BBC had done an appalling job with pop on the...

He was one of Britain's greatest record producers, a man immersed in the possibilities of sound at a time when studio facilities were still...

The city of Hamburg and its clubs feature heavily in the legend of the Beatles. But they were far from the only band to play there. In fact, during...

It was only really after World War II that people in England began to hear the blues, on records brought back by sailors and music broadcast on the...

Everyone associates psychedelia with 1967 and the hippie era. That's certainly when it found its full flowering, but even before that, it was taking...

The 1950s was definitely the period of the male pop star, the rocker who appealed to girls. But the 1960s brought a change, with the rise of the...

A lot of people don't know the term freakbeat, and it's certainly unusual. It's one used by record collectors, especially in the US, to describe the...

There were high hopes among the young for Radio 1 went it went on the air at 7 a.m. in September 1967, with disc jockey Tony Blackburn spinning the...

There's a definite arc that can be traced in music from early rock'n'roll to the seismic shift the Beatles caused when they broke on the British...

Through the first part of the 1960s, records had been released mostly by the major labels, like EMI, Phillips and Decca, the three giants of the...

The Beatles revolutionised pop music; it’s both as simple and as big as that. They wrote some of the world’s most memorable songs, used the recording...

During the 1950s television had been very kind to rock'n'roll. They were both young forms, finding their way, both experimenting. But by the time the...

Formed in 1962 and still going strong, they're probably the richest band on the planet, with individual fortunes running into the many millions. When...

Summer 1967 was a magical time in music. The news was full of hippies in San Francisco, and at home suddenly everything seemed more colourful. Men...

It’s an appealing name, one that came from America, a title given to the area in New York where so many music publishers kept their offices (it came...

Fame has often been as much about opportunity as ambition - being in the right place at the right time. In the early days of rock'n'roll, on both...

Liverpool and the area around it, has always been a little different, with its own humour, its own distinctive accent and attitude. In the 1950s it...