UK gripped by new wave of Beatlemania ahead of four biopics

A fresh wave of Beatlemania is sweeping the UK. Paul McCartney’s 20th solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, was billed as “an adventurous and limber take on guitar music”. England’s World Cup squad announcement used Come Together alongside footage of fashionable young people in New York and a clip of a young, puckish John Lennon, and Stephen Colbert was played off from his final episode of the Late Show by a Paul McCartney rendition of Hello Goodbye.

In Felixstowe, 70 people recreated the cover of Sgt Peppers to campaign for a “Beatles Day”, while discoveries of memorabilia surface regularly and Peter Murrell used party funds to buy a special edition Beatles pen set for £1,475. Ian Leslie, author of John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, said the UK is in the middle of a new wave reminiscent of the 1990s revival and argued the group were wrongly measured against the Rolling Stones for decades.

“That rivalry is irrelevant; they moved on to a plane of their own,” he said, likening their status to Shakespeare’s.

United Kingdom, Felixstowe

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