The Beatles and the 1960s

Author Ken Campbell has given an intriguingly personal, yet historical account ... The Beatles and the 1960s: Reception, Revolution and Social Change (Bloomsbury, 2021) captures what few volumes are able to do: give those details that are already familiar to the devoted and yet place these memories inside a contextual, readable and relatable narrative, not usual for this style of book ... a highly important historical treatise, gathering steam from Kennedy to Kennedy, from Profumo to Paris. * Beatles-Freak's Reviews * Kenneth L. Campbell's The Beatles and the 1960s: Reception, Revolution, and Social Change explores the Fab Four's extraordinary cultural achievements through a trenchant historical lens. In so doing, Campbell affords readers with a powerful window into the group's reception with each passing masterwork. By tracing the Beatles' artistic growth within the context of key sociocultural shifts during the 1960s, Campbell not only demonstrates the manner in which their work acted as a response to contemporaneous factors, he presciently reveals the ways in which their music continues to resonate into our present day. * Kenneth Womack, John Lennon 1980: The Last Days in the Lie * Whether you grew up with the Beatles or are discovering them for the first time, The Beatles and the 1960s will give you a fresh understanding of the group's historical context, their reception by critics and fans, the growth of their music and personalities alongside their listeners' lives, and their lasting social and cultural legacies. Guiding us from England to Germany, the U.S. and the world beyond, from Beatlemania through films, stadium tours, godlike personae, psychedelia, and revolutionary experimentation to the most crushing breakup in pop history, Kenneth Campbell offers the reader a new appreciation shaped by both contemporaneous opinion and Brexit-era reconsideration, thereby joining social attitudes across the decades that separate one set of culture wars from another. College-newspaper record reviews, comments by world-shaking recording artists, and dozens of perceptive fan interviews are just some of the newly curated sources that bring the Beatles, their audience and their world to life in this volume. * Walter Everett, Professor of Music, University of Michigan, USA *