The Beatles I INTRODUCTION Beatlemania BBC Worldwide Americas, Inc.

« more sophisticated lyrical ideas.

The group’s next album, Rubber Soul (1965), is regarded as a creative breakthrough.

It featured instruments innovative to Western pop/rock music, such as the Indian sitar, and experimental sounds.

The Revolver album (1966) was another important advance in songwriting and musical craftsmanship for the band. IV LATER YEARS AND BREAKUP The pressures caused by the group’s extreme popularity—known as Beatlemania—resulted in safety problems for the group, especially when performing live.

On August29, 1966, the band played a show in San Francisco, California, which turned out to be their last public concert.

Retreating to the studio, the Beatles produced a string ofincreasingly complex compositions, such as the single “Penny Lane”/”Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967).

The 1967 album Sgt.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a creative milestone hailed for its lyrical and musical brilliance.

The album was a result of more than 700 hours of studio time and featured a brass band, an orchestra,Indian instruments, and psychedelic textures in songs such as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “A Day in the Life.” A television film, Magical Mystery Tour (1967), extended the surreal and experimental vein with songs such as “I Am the Walrus.” Yellow Submarine (1968) , an animated film featuring the Beatles’ songs and likenesses, was also released during this time. Worn down by the demands of their fame and by personal disagreements, the group began to splinter around the time of the release of The Beatles (1968), usually known as The White Album because of its plain white cover.

These growing divisions within the band were displayed in the recording sessions that were filmed in 1969for Let It Be , a documentary film about the album of the same name, which was released in 1970.

The final Beatles studio album was Abbey Road (1969).

Despite increasingly separate musical activity through this period, the group's members continued to produce popular, high-quality songs, from “Revolution” and “Hey Jude”(both 1968) to the optimistic “Here Comes the Sun” (1969) and the poignant “The Long and Winding Road” (1970).

McCartney formally announced the group’s breakupon April 10, 1970.

The Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. After the break each member of the group pursued another musical career, either as a solo artist or as bandleader.

Despite individual successes, members were oftenapproached with requests to reunite, fueling wide speculation.

This talk ended when Lennon was murdered by an obsessed fan in 1980.

In 2001 Harrison died ofcancer. In 1995 the first volume of a three-album retrospective of the Beatles, Anthology, was released, accompanied by a television miniseries of the same name.

The Anthology album included “Free as a Bird,” a song for which Lennon recorded a rough demo before he died, and to which the surviving Beatles added their own voices in 1994 and 1995 to create a “new” song by the group.

It became one of the fastest-selling albums in the history of popular music, and the second and third albums ofthe series were released in 1996.

The group’s enduring appeal was evident when a compilation of their biggest hits, Beatles 1, became one of the most popular albums of 2000.

A collection of edited and restructured Beatles’ songs, created for the Canadian circus company Cirque du Soleil, was released as the album Love in 2006. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation.

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