The Beatles formed in 1960 and the band’s first album, Please Please Me appeared in March 1963. Seven years later, in April 1970, Paul McCartney publicly announced his departure, which brought an official end to the remarkable musical endeavor, and paved the way for its members to pursue solo careers.
The Beatles never toured Mexico, but the omission of a live performance, and the absence now of their physical presence as a band, fail to dampen Mexico’s interminable love and care for the Fab Four from Liverpool.
Over fifty years and nearly three generations later, Mexicans’ love of the Beatles lives on, and not just in wistful memory. Radio Universal in Mexico City plays two hours of Beatles songs (mornings and evenings) every weekday on a program featuring the band’s best-known hits as well giving listeners an opportunity to discover some of their more obscure numbers.
Mexico is awash with Beatles Tribute Bands—they perform regularly in the capital. In 2015, Mexico set a new World Record for the most number of people to gather dressed as members of The Beatles and they remain among the most-listened to bands on Spotify. Even now, restaurants, cafés, night-clubs, museums, street art, book collections—and more, remain replete with Beatles memorabilia, and there are plenty of Facebook groups too.
In the spring of 2012 —forty-two years after the Beatles officially broke-up— Paul McCartney returned to Mexico City and gave a free concert in the capital’s Zocalo—the second-largest central plaza in the world. 80,000 people roared when Paul opened the concert with All my loving, and he continued to keep devoted fans enthralled by performing virtually non-stop for nearly three hours with contemporary renditions of Beatles classics as well as popular songs from Wings and his solo career.
McCartney continues to bring his live shows to Mexico, with sell-out concerts given to 65,000 fans at Mexico City’s Foro Sol venue. His last performance there was in November 2023.
Mexico’s ongoing enchantment with a British band from a city in the north of England most Mexicans had never heard of before The Beatles arrived is testament to the influence that music can have—across borders, and across generations.
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