Includes index

This book seeks to understand what the Beatles meant to people in 1960s Britain. It argues that they were iconic, divisive, atypical and prefigurative: themes introduced and illustrated in the preface using contemporary cartoons. Their depiction as icons in the 1964 Daily Mail cartoon contrasted starkly with their first appearance in a Fleet Street cartoon twelve months previously, when theirs was one of a barrage of British records raining down on the Kremlin in a display of soft power. They received minor billing in February 1963 compared to Susan Maughan, Helen Shapiro, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Marty Wilde and the Tornados, as befitted a band whose second single (Please Please Me) was competing for the number one spot with Frank Ifield's The Wayward Wind (1963). Over the following year, they achieved what commentators agreed to be an unprecedented celebrity"