The Beatles were the British rock music group, which revolutionised popular music around the world in 1960’s. From 1964 through 1969, the Beatles achieved unprecedented popularity with 30 songs reaching the Billboard magazine top-ten popular music charts. The band was put together in 1960 in Liverpool, England, from an earlier group called the Quarry Men.

The Beatles originally had five members — guitarists George Harrison and John Lennon, bassists Paul McCartney and Stuart Sutcliffe, and drummer Peter Best. Sutcliffe left the group a year later and drummer Ringo Starr replaced Best in 1962.

Influenced by American rock-and-roll artists of the late 1950s, such as Little Richard and Buddy Holly, the Beatles styled their songs in an advanced manner of Tin Pan Alley, an American tradition of popular-music song writing that peaked in the 1920s and 1930s.

From the simple, fresh style of their early songs, such as I Want to Hold Your Hand (1963) and A Hard Day’s Night (1964), the Beatles progressed to innovative, experimental works — culminating in the album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Considered the first concept album (songs unified by a common theme), Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was also admired for its haunting harmony and lyrics, unconventional musical phrases and rhythms, and the integrated use of electronic music and the Indian sitar.

Other Beatles’ albums include With the Beatles (1963), Beatles for Sale (1964), the motion-picture soundtrack Help! (1965), Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), The Beatles (1968), Abbey Road (1969), and Let it Be (1970). Some of their greatest hits are Let it be, Yellow Submarine, Love Me Do and Hey Jude, which is still remembered and listened to.

In 1970, the Beatles split up and each member pursued their own musical career, either as a solo artist or as bandleader. Despite individual successes, members were often approached with requests to reunite, fuelling wide speculation until John Lennon’s murder in 1980.

The Beatles won the Grammy Trustees Award in 1972 and the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. 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 includes 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 of the 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.