Monthly Highlights Update: February 2024

It is now February and a belated Happy New Year from Rocking at the Hops! This time, we will not only be announcing a new monthly highlights, but also a general update for how this year's highlight are going to look!

To recap, last highlights over December and January we saw three non-festive albums that featured some brilliant Christmas songs. These were: Elton John's Caribou, Paul McCartney's McCartney II and If I Should Fall From Grace With God by the Pogues.

Now, for 2024, we have decided to incorporate a bit of musical history into our highlights, focusing on anniversaries. Every month, we will take a look at key developments or releases that occurred in popular music within that month, for years ending in four, celebrating their anniversaries this year!

To kick things off, where better to start than with musical royalty, the Beatles. Following a period of success in early 1963 with the release of their debut album Please Please Me, the excitement around the Liverpool band soon erupted into a full blown frenzy, as Beatlemania descended across Britain. A number of contemporary commentators, from music fans and critics, to business people and politicians, struggled to understand and explain the phenomenon. The upshot, was that it became clear that this could not be contained to the British Isles, and murmurs of a new exciting sound started to wash across the Atlantic into the United States towards the end of 1963.

Following on from this, the event that truly cemented the Beatles in popular music history occurred on February 9th 1964, when they appeared on popular US variety entertainment programme, the Ed Sullivan Show. Watched by an estimated 73 million people, this appearance ultimately launched the British Invasion into America and a flood of artists then made their way across the pond for a chance at success that had so far eluded any British music artist.

The rest as they say, is history. But for this month, February 2024, we have highlighted three hugely influential albums that would come to represent the sound of the British Invasion, and alter the course of popular music in Britain and America. Head on over to the home page to check them out!