‘It went f***ing nuts!’ The Beatles did it – but what does it really take for a British act to break America?

Sixty years ago The Beatles blasted out of a smoggy England to set America ablaze with a string of incendiary slots on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’, throwing down the gauntlet for future British guitar-slingers. Michael Hann speaks to Bush, The Beat and Def Leppard about their wild days on the highways and how to cope when it all kicks off

Generations of British bands still hope to replicate the Stateside success of The Beatles in the Eighties (Getty)

Sunday night was the big one on US TV. That’s when Ed Sullivan was on. Every night, between 8 and 9pm eastern time, American families would gather around their sets as the oddly stiff TV host introduced magicians, vaudeville acts, opera singers, and pop groups. Sixty years ago this month The Ed Sullivan Show changed Britain’s pop relationship with America forever. Over three consecutive weeks – on 9, 16 and 23 February – The Beatles performed, rewriting pop history with each appearance.

For the band’s first show, 73 million viewers tuned in – more than three times the usual audience for Sullivan; some 50,000 people had applied for the 728 spots available in the audience at Studio 50 in Manhattan. The Beatles offered an explosion of brash good cheer across five songs; a promise of something different and happier. Just like that, Beatlemania was launched, and with it “the British Invasion” as America turned to the new take on rock’n’roll coming out of England.

Since then, the idea of “breaking America” has been a great lure for British acts: all those would-be fans, that untapped potential and the open road. Few made it: most returned home with nothing more than an NME front cover of them in front of the Statue of Liberty. They all soon learnt that conquering the land of the free isn’t for the faint-hearted.