‘It’ll be like Barbenheimer’: UK gripped by new wave of Beatlemania in lead-up to four biopics

Fab Four are still making waves 60 years on – and upcoming Sam Mendes films are expected to turn the hype up to 11

I f anyone needed a reminder of the enduring cultural clout of the Beatles, the past few weeks have provided a glut. Firstly, there’s the small matter of The Boys of Dungeon Lane , Paul McCartney’s 20th solo album, billed as “an adventurous and limber take on guitar music” by the Guardian.

When England announced their World Cup squad, the soundtrack was Come Together, played alongside a film of fashionable young people in New York and a clip of a young, puckish John Lennon. The same week Stephen Colbert was played off from his final episode of the Late Show by a Paul McCartney rendition of Hello Goodbye .

In the less showbiz locale of Felixstowe, 70 people got together to campaign for a “Beatles Day” by recreating the cover of Sgt Peppers , while barely a week passes without a “new” discovery of memorabilia and artefacts connected to the Fab Four.

On the other end of the scale, Peter Murrell, the disgraced former SNP chief executive who admitted embezzlement this week, is a fan – and used party funds to buy a special edition Beatles pen set for £1,475.

Ian Leslie, the bestselling author of John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, said the UK was in the middle of a new wave of Beatlemania that was reminiscent of the 1990s revival. “We’re only just starting to come to terms with how big a cultural phenomenon they were,” said Leslie, who thinks the group were wrongly measured up against the Rolling Stones for decades.

“That rivalry is irrelevant; they moved on to a plane of their own. You think about Shakespeare: we’re still reading Marlowe and the other Elizabethan playwrights, but the bard is – like the Beatles – in a whole separate category.”

The Beatles occupy a unique place in the British cultural imagination. Their songs have soundtracked lives for the past 60 years, while the band’s friendships, breakups and tragedies provided a psychodrama that still captivates today.