12 Facts About British Invasion

British Invasion was a cultural phenomenon of the mid-1960s, when rock and pop music acts from the United Kingdom and other aspects of British culture became popular in the United States and significant to the rising "counterculture" on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Young British Invasion groups started to combine various British Invasion and American styles in different parts of the United Kingdom, such as the movement in Liverpool known as Merseybeat or the "beat boom".

Cliff Richard, who was the best-selling British Invasion act in the United Kingdom at the time, had only one top forty hit in the US with "Living Doll" in 1959.

One week after the Beatles entered the Hot 100 for the first time, Dusty Springfield, having launched a solo career after her participation in the Springfields, became the next British Invasion act to reach the Hot 100, peaking at number twelve with "I Only Want to Be with You".

The British Invasion Commonwealth held down the top six on the Hot 100 on 1 May 1965 and the top six on Cash Box singles chart's Top Ten on 24 April 1965.

Related searches

British Invasion acts dominated the music charts at home in the United Kingdom.

British Invasion had a profound impact on popular music, internationalising the production of rock and roll, establishing the British popular music industry as a viable centre of musical creativity, and opening the door for subsequent British performers to achieve international success.

The British Invasion played a major part in the rise of a distinct genre of rock music and cemented the primacy of the rock group, based around guitars and drums and producing their own material as singer-songwriters.

Stylistically, the proportions of US music being made did not change substantially during the Invasion, even as the British acts flooded the charts with a homogenous pop-rock sound; folk, country and novelty music, already small factors in the overall pop realm, dropped to near-nonexistence, while girl groups were hard hit.

The claim that British beat bands were not radically different from US groups like the Beach Boys and damaged the careers of black US and female artists was made about the invasion.

British progressive rock acts of the 1970s were often more popular in the U S than their native Britain, as the US working class was generally favourable to the virtuosity of progressive rock acts while the bands' British audience was confined to the more genteel upper classes.

At least one British Invasion act would appear somewhere on the Hot 100 every week from 2 November 1963 until 20 April 2002, originating with the debut of the Caravelles' "You Don't Have to Be a Baby to Cry".