‘Nobody had ever made it’: George Harrison says pressure was on for The Beatles’ US tour

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For UK-based bands, breaking America appears to be the gold standard that few have managed.

Oasis and Blur failed to do so at the peak of their powers but The Beatles, according to George Harrison, paved the way for other musicians to try their luck in the United States. The so-called quiet one of the band spoke about their success in Europe and North America, where the band would perform legendary shows, including two nights at Shea Stadium. Harrison, in an interview from 1977, suggested that it was because of him, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney, that other groups were able to break into America for tours of their own. He may have a point, given that The Beatles’ tour of the United States proved so massively successful. The band would ride Beatlemania across the US before retiring from touring and instead focusing on studio albums, each better than the last.

Harrison said the only exception to his theory is singer Lonnie Donegan, but other than that, British acts at the time had little to no chance of succeeding in the United States. He claimed: “Oh yeah, we did. But we knew we’d had sufficient success in Europe and Britain to have a bit of confidence. And we really needed a helluva lot of confidence for the States because it was such an important place. I mean, nobody’d ever made it, you know, British acts– apart from the odd singer like Lonnie Donegan.”

The Something songwriter went on to say that the turning point for The Beatles’ success in the US was their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, a legendary performance that revealed more about The Beatles than fans had anticipated.

Harrison said: “But Ed Sullivan was, you know – Everybody had told us how he was really big. But again, we were pretty naive to certain things so that helped at the time. I remember them asking us did we know who Walter Cronkite was. And I said, ‘I dunno, isn’t he somebody on the television?’ You know, things like that were good because they all had fun– the people asking questions and the press– us being naive and not seeming to care about that sort of thing.”

Fellow bandmate McCartney would reflect on The Ed Sullivan Show as a turning point for the band, but the producers put out information regarding Lennon’s relationship status that wasn’t publicly known at the time.

McCartney wrote: “During our second song, Till There Was You, they cut to shots of each of us and put our names up on the screen. When they got to John, they added, ‘Sorry girls, he’s married’ – which had been a badly kept secret up until that point.”