British Invasion - Influence

Influence

The British Invasion had a profound impact on the shape of popular music. It helped internationalize the production of rock and roll, establishing the British popular music industry as a viable centre of musical creativity, and opening the door for subsequent British and Irish performers to achieve international success. In America the Invasion arguably spelled the end of such acts as instrumental surf music (though not vocal surf music), pre-Motown vocal girl groups, the folk revival (which adapted by evolving into folk rock), and (for a time) the teen idols that had dominated the American charts in the late 1950s and 60s.

It dented the careers of established R&B acts like Chubby Checker and temporarily derailed the chart success of certain surviving rock and roll acts, including Fats Domino and Elvis Presley. It prompted many existing garage rock bands to adopt a sound with a British Invasion inflection and inspired many other groups to form, creating a scene from which many major American acts of the next decade would emerge. The British Invasion also played a major part in the rise of a distinct genre of rock music and cemented the primacy of the rock group, based around guitars and drums and producing their own material as singer-songwriters.

Though many of the acts associated with the invasion did not survive its end, many others would become icons of rock music. That the sound of British beat bands was not radically different from American groups like The Beach Boys, and damaged the careers of African-American and female artists, has been the subject of criticism of the Invasion, even though the Motown sound actually increased in popularity during that time.

Other American groups also demonstrated a similar sound to the British Invasion artists and in turn highlighted how the British 'sound' was not in itself a wholly new or original one. Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, for example, acknowledged the debt that American artists owed to British musicians, such as the Searchers, but that ‘‘they were using folk music licks that I was using anyway. So it’s not that big a rip-off.’’ The US Sunshine pop group The Buckinghams and the Beatles influenced US Tex-Mex act The Sir Douglas Quintet adopted British sounding names. Roger Miller tipped his hat to the British in "England Swings" in late 1965. Englishman Geoff Stephens reciprocated the gesture ala Rudy Vallée a year later in The New Vaudeville Band's "Winchester Cathedral".

In Australia, the success of The Easybeats (a band formed mostly of British emigrants) closely paralleled that of the British Invasion. The band drew heavily on the British Invasion sound and had one hit in the United States during the British Invasion era: "Friday on My Mind".

According to Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, the British invasion pushed the Counterculture into the mainstream.