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The Beatles were the first British band to have success in America. In 1964, The Ed Sullivan Show played host to their first American television performance and was watched by approximately 73 million viewers in the USA. The Beatles’ rapid success and growing fan base in America saw them hold the top 5 places in the Billboard Top 100, which is still a record to this day. In 1965, they played at the Shea Stadium, New York, to a world record crowd of 55,600 people. The success of British bands in America was known as the ‘British Invasion'. Other bands followed suit, including the Rolling Stones and The Who.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was one of the first ever concept albums and led the way to albums having longer songs and thematic links. Technological advances played a vital role as the complexity of The Beatles’ music developed. Producer George Martin and sound engineer Geoff Emerick used signal processing (dynamic range, reverberation, signal limiting) on the recordings as well as running instruments through a Leslie speaker. New production techniques were also used and included pitch control, direct injection (DI), automatic double tracking (ADT) and ambiophonics.

With A Little Help from My Friends has been covered by many different artists and groups from when it was first released in 1967. English singer Joe Cocker performed the first cover of the song at Woodstock in 1969 and most recently, the NHS Voices in 2018.