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TL;DR:

  • Paul McCartney knew he and his bandmates were attractive when The Beatles’ fans were screaming.
  • The band grew tired of the screaming, and that partly inspired Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
  • The shrieking fans are an important part of the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

One of the most famous aspects of Beatlemania was the Fab Four’s screaming fans. Paul McCartney said The Beatles enjoyed when their fans screamed at first. Despite this, they came to see this phenomenon as part of their passe bubblegum image.

Paul McCartney said The Beatles wanted to be physically attractive to their fans

During a 2021 interview with NPR, Paul said The Beatles enjoyed it when Fab Four fans screamed. “We were just like most young guys,” he said. “We just wanted to have a girlfriend and basically do as much as we could, was the idea. So as we got fans, that became our motivation, which was, we were trying to be attractive in any way you like — visually, physically, sexually. We didn’t mind, as long as we were attractive, because as kids, we were apparently not very attractive and we certainly weren’t the big kind of quarterback who attracted all the girls in town.

“It was kind of the opposite for us, so I suppose, as we got more and more popular and the girls started screaming, to tell you the truth, we just enjoyed it,” he added. “It was the fulfillment of all our dreams. It really was just we young guys trying to get laid, as Americans would say.”

How the members of the Fab Four got tired of the shrieking as time went on

Of course, Paul also said the screaming grew tiring. In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul said the members of the band stopped wanting to be treated like boys by 1967. They saw themselves as men, and they were done with their mop-top days.

After being exposed to marijuana, The Beatles started considering themselves artists rather than mere performers. That’s part of why the group decided to make the experimental concept album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. By taking on the personas of other musicians, they were able to shed their bubblegum image.

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Paul McCartney’s take on The Beatles’ fandom doesn’t acknowledge the fans’ importance

It’s understandable that Paul would find all the noise annoying. At the same time, that racket was a good thing. That sort of passion is what makes a band into a phenomenon. The world probably didn’t see a fandom as devoted as the Beatlemaniacs until the social media era.

Screaming fans have inspired scorn, derision, and a grotesque sequence in The Monkees’ film Head. Despite that, they remain an important part of rock ‘n’ roll history. If The Beatles, The Monkees, and other acts didn’t inspire that kind of mania in the 1960s, who knows if we would be talking about them today?

Screaming fans can be annoying but they can also change musical history.

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