Not long after Ringo Starr joined The Beatles, the band began to enjoy a seemingly endless string of No. 1 singles. They were so popular that it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever end their streak. Of course, someone eventually did, but the band didn’t take it too hard. According to Starr, The Beatles saw this as a relief.
Ringo Starr said The Beatles felt relieved when a single didn’t hit No. 1
In 1963, The Beatles began dominating the charts. For years, they were unbeatable; it seemed that nothing they released could fail. While this was exciting, Starr said it also put a great deal of pressure on the band.
“After Number One, where else is there to go? Number One was It,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “After that, of course, every bloody thing we did was Number One and it got strange because in a weird way we were waiting for the one that wasn’t Number One.”
In 1967, the string of successes finally came to an end. Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Release Me” beat “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” According to Starr, this was a great relief for the band.
“And when that happened we felt, ‘Thank God that’s over,’” he said. “It was a lot of pressure: we had a dozen in a row that went to Number One, so the one that didn’t was a real relief.”
Their string of No. 1 hits kicked off Beatlemania
The band’s dominance on the chart was proof of their popularity. With their success came the rise of Beatlemania.
“That’s where they wanted to be — Number One; but with it came the beginning of Beatlemania,” their road manager, Neil Aspinall, said. “They’d had a lot of madness in Liverpool, but they knew all the kids there. They didn’t try to jump on you or overturn the van or rip the wing mirrors off. Suddenly this absolute craziness was going on, which was very exciting, but difficult to deal with.”
Their power lay in the fact that they seemed to appeal to everyone.
“When they performed, it was just a permanent scream,” Aspinall said. “It was mainly girls, but it was a strange thing about The Beatles that there were a lot of guys there as well. They appealed to everybody.”
Despite what Ringo Starr said, The Beatles were not happy with who ended their run
While The Beatles were grateful that they no longer worried about when someone would knock them from the top of the charts, they would have preferred that someone else do it. The band, and particularly John Lennon, were not fans of Humperdinck.
According to the book Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney by Howard Sounes, Lennon described McCartney’s solo album McCartney as “Engelbert Humperdinck music.” McCartney took this as a grave insult.
“I’ve never come back at him, not at all, but I can’t hide my anger about all the things he said at the time, about the Muzak, about me singing like Engelbert Humperdinck,” he said.
Still, even Lennon was publicly gracious about Humperdinck’s success.
