BEATLEMANIA was born sixty years ago in October 1963 - and a new video features first-hand testimony of that groundbreaking period in British pop music.
The ten-minute long video, released by the award-winning Beatles Story exhibition in Liverpool, includes recollections by a former girlfriend of George Harrison.
Bernie Byrne, who would go on to co-found The Beatles Story, was in a car with Harrison being driven away from a gig at the Floral Hall in Southport in 1962.
The car was being mobbed and chased by young fans, an experience she describes as "terrifying." What she saw that night was the beginning of a phenomenon that would shape the next 60 years of pop culture, and which would later be known as "Beatlemania."
For most of 1963 there had been reports of teenage girls screaming, crying and fainting with excitement at Beatles gigs.
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On October 5, when the Beatles played Glasgow Concert Hall, so much damage was done to the premises by fans that Glasgow Corporation declared that it was unlikely that it would let the hall again to similar groups.
Reported the Evening Times: "The screaming spectators, some of whom danced on the streets, damaged 100 seats and caused plasterwork at the side of the balcony to become loose".
Mounted police in West Nile Street try to control the crowd of Beatles fans who have gathered for the concert at the Odeon cinema in Renfield Street, Glasgow, in October 1964 (Image: Newsquest)
City Treasurer Richard Buchanan said: "This kind of behaviour is not going to be tolerated in Glasgow Concert Hall.
"There was so much shouting and screaming that, I am told, the Beatles group could not be heard. The balcony was actually shaking with all the pandemonium that was going on".
The Corporation quickly cancelled a concert, due to be staged at the venue on November 8, featuring Gerry and the Pacemakers.
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On October 13 the phenomenon was catapulted into the public eye when The Beatles played the popular ITV show, Sunday Night at the Palladium. This performance to a TV audience of 15 million viewers that would help define the word "Beatlemania."
The question has, however, often been asked - who did coin the term?
Police hold back some of the fans who gathered outside the Renfield Street Odeon, hoping to see the Beatles on April 30, 1964 (Image: Newsquest)The Beatles Story relates that claim had been laid by the Scottish concert promoter, Andi Lothian, in the aftermath of that riotous Glasgow concert on October 5.
When asked by a reporter to explain what was happening at the gig as a group of girls rushed the stage he reportedly said "that’s Beatlemania."
Author Ken McNab, a former Glasgow Evening Times journalist who is one of Scotland's leading experts on Beatles, touches on the issue in his newly-published book, Shake It Up, Baby!: The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963.
The Beatles eat a bag of popcorn during a photocall at Lewisham Theatre, London, on December 9, 1963 (Image: Terry Fincher/Express/Getty Images)
McNab writes that in what was "reputedly a throwaway soundbite to a radio reporter", Lothian remarked: "Don't worry, it's only Beatlemania".
The Daily Mail had used "Beatlemania" in a headline on October 21, writes McNab, while the Daily Mirror tried to copyright the phrase after using it to describe scenes at a Beatles concert in Cheltenham on November 1.
Even before then - but after the Glasgow concert - a documentary, The Mersey Sound, was broadcast on TV, on October 9, in London and the north of England. Reviewing it four days later, on the 13th, the Observer's TV critic spoke of "the degree of Beatlemania".
Regardless of who devised the phrase, it rapidly became part of everyday speech. "Once it caught on", observes McNab, "the idiom seemed to crystallise the phenomenon in real time in the collective imagination of press and public alike".
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In the new Beatles Story video, Beryl Marsden, a Merseybeat singer who supported the Beatles on their final UK tour, says Beatlemania "was crazy, indescribable actually ... It was like a bombardment of screaming and crying".
Freda Kelly, who was secretary to Brian Epstein, and is President of the Official Beatles Fan Club, says: "They [the fans] were so excited of seeing them on stage, they just had to release the tension by screaming.
The year 1963 was hugely important in the Beatles story. As Ken McNab puts it: "They went from playing to a handful of people in the remote Scottish Highlands to four number-one singles, two number-one albums, three UK tours and being besieged by fans at gigs all over Britain".
https://www.beatlesstory.com/ Shake It Up Baby! is published by Polygon, £22. Twitter: @Shake It Up Baby @beatleken
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