Turned down, then unstoppable
The name was a pun, with 'beat' squeezed into beetles as a nod to Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets. On New Year's Day 1962, the BEATLES recorded fifteen songs as an audition for the Decca record company in London. Decca turned them down — reportedly deciding that guitar groups were on their way out — and signed a different band that had auditioned the same day. Two years later, in April 1964, the Beatles held all top five places on the American singles chart at once.
Their final public performance was just as unexpected. On 30 January 1969 they climbed onto the roof of their own office building in central London and played, without warning, to the streets below, until the police came up to ask them to turn it down.
A guitar made from a fireplace
As a teenager, QUEEN's guitarist Brian May couldn't afford the electric guitar he wanted, so in the 1960s he and his father built one at home. The neck was carved from wood taken from a century-old fireplace, and bits of motorbike springs and the tip of a knitting needle went in along the way. He named it the Red Special, played it on almost every QUEEN record, and still strums it with an old sixpence coin instead of a plastic pick.
He finished something else he had started, too. May had put aside a PhD in astrophysics when the band took off in the 1970s, and completed it in 2007, more than thirty years later.
Waterloo, and a fish company
ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 with 'Waterloo', on a stage in Brighton, and went on to become one of the best-selling acts in history. Their name comes from the first letters of the four members' first names — Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid — but a Swedish seafood company was already called Abba, so the band asked whether they could share it. The fish company said yes.
America's best-selling album isn't Thriller
Ask which album has sold the most copies in the United States and most people guess Michael Jackson's Thriller. In 2018 the official count put the EAGLES ahead, with Their Greatest Hits 1971–1975, a collection of songs from their first four albums. Thriller still leads worldwide. Pink Floyd hold a different record: The Dark Side of the Moon has spent more than 900 weeks on the main American album chart, well over seventeen years in total, longer than any other album. Some solo stars began in groups, too: Sting was the singer and bass player of the POLICE before going solo, and our pop stars puzzle has him and other solo acts.
A gig at the bottom of the world
In December 2013 METALLICA played a short concert at a research station in Antarctica, becoming the first band to play on all seven continents in a single year. To protect the environment, their amplifiers were sealed inside boxes and the crowd of about 120 scientists and competition winners listened through headphones, making it probably the quietest heavy metal gig ever played.