When The Beatles first arrived, they were seen as a straight forward pop group, but the difference was that they wrote their own songs. The 1963 transition in the music scene was definitely that more songwriters performed their own songs, rather than stars being ‘manufactured’ by songwriters and music publishers; the writers churned the songs out and the publishers placed them with other acts. A lot of those early singer-songwriters like Neil Sedaka, Gene Pitney and Carole King were writers for other people before they were performers.
When the music industry changed, it opened up whole new opportunities for people to do it on their own, rather than waiting to be chosen by the publishing and record industry of the time. You could come to The Marquee Club and record companies would come to see you there. It was the start of A&R (Artist & Repertoire, the record company department which signs and develops acts), only in those days, it was producers who would go out, look at bands in clubs and pick one to work with.
The Beatle thing was really quite exciting, because it resulted in a more edgy style of music, which in a way was because what was happening to your life meant that you evolved mentally. Nobody bothered before with that sort of development before, because the same music was constantly being served up. I think it was a time when people started to get a bit more intellectual about music, getting interested in things like guitarists and riffs. And I think a lot of it was to do with the break from the Fifties; my dad looked like his dad, but he never looked like me.
The natural progression from that was that my father’s clothes weren’t interesting for me, therefore my father wasn’t interesting for me, what my father did wasn’t very interesting to me, what he had to say wasn’t very interesting to me. You could hang on to history with your father by doing things like going to football together, but we were moving further and further away and it was necessary for the new generation to make bigger statements to distance ourselves even further from our fathers’ generation. We were different, and we were enforcing it all the time by our own clubs, our own music scene, our own fashion, our own relationships, our own style of conversation and our own beliefs.