We’re down to the last two in our countdown of the top 20 BIGGEST BEATLES’ YEARS.

The runner-up…

(no.2) 1964 - “Ladies and gentlemen… the Beatles!”

In which Britain became the epicentre of global entertainment. A year before the Beatles, Dave Clark Five and the Animals stormed America, such notions would have seemed ludicrous. Brian Epstein always insisted that his Beatles would become bigger than Elvis - and there was no one bigger than him. Until February 1964, that is.

The Beatles were holed up in their French hotel suite when Epstein broke the news that ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ had become the US Billboard number one. Their planned trip to America suddenly took on terrifying new dimensions: staggering crowds welcoming their arrival at JFK Airport, fans crawling all over their hotel like ants, their music blasting from every radio station in New York. Then, their appearance on Ed Sullivan’s CBS show drew the biggest TV audience in America - reckoned to be over 70 million viewers in a population of 192 million.

The next, world-conquering step would be the big screen. The Beatles’ first movie, A Hard Day’s Night, would engrave their individual identities upon the public: John the smart wit, Paul the cute romantic, Ringo the sad clown and George, rightly or wrongly, the quiet one. Alun Owen’s script imagined a farcical day in the life of the Beatles, a mix of the absurd and mundane, replete with one-liners layered in wholesome scouse interspersed with director Richard Lester’s joyful musical sequences. If one half of America’s future rock generation would cite their Ed Sullivan Show appearance as the stimulus to pick up an instrument, the other half would credit watching A Hard Day’s Night as their inspiration for joining a band.

Their music had already pushed ahead, with John’s Dylan-influenced acoustic laments, Paul’s bluesier vocals (a nod to the ever evolving British pop scene) and the chiming, 12-string guitar sound of George’s new Rickenbacker informing the new-and-improved Beatles sound of ‘64. Meeting with Dylan in New York turned the Beatles into casual pot smokers and ‘getting high’ - a stimulant to much of their material going forward in ‘65, while Bob took his cue from British groups to plug-in and get amplified.

Meanwhile, the Beatles kept heading into the unknown, their competitors falling by the wayside and Merseybeat already a distant memory. The world simply opened up to them - the new jet-age superstars who travelled as far as humanly possible on terra firma. Of all Earth’s forces, it seemed only gravity could hold them down.

Listen to this: A Hard Day’s Night

That ringing chord - ‘clannngg!’ - as distinctive an opening as the zinging feedback from their closing song of ‘64, ‘I Feel Fine’. They always knew how to stand-out from everybody else.