On This Day in 1963, The Beatles Performed to a Tough Swedish Critic: “No Musical Importance Whatsoever”

There’s eating crow, and then there’s the Swedish music critic who once claimed The Beatles were a band of “no musical importance whatsoever” in 1963. A pop reviewer for Karlstad newspaper, Nya Wemlands Tidning, attended an early Fab Four concert in a secondary school hall in 1963. This show predated the band’s historic television debut in the States by several months. The young quartet was still cutting their teeth around Europe, hardly at the level of fame they would come to enjoy in the next several years. And as they learned the day after their Karlstad show, part of cutting one’s teeth in the entertainment industry is getting a lousy review.

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And the Nya Wemlands Tidning review was lousy. According to Mark Lewisohn’s Complete Beatles Chronicle, the reviewer “thought the Beatles terrible, their music corny, and their playing out of rhythm, adding that the group should have been grateful the fans’ screams helped drown out their awful performance, and then he concluded by stating that The Beatles were of no musical importance whatsoever and that their local support group, The Phantoms, decidedly outshone them.”

Of course, Beatlemanic Swedes would have disagreed with the music critic. Just days before, The Beatles attempted to sightsee in Stockholm but had to call it off after fans began swarming them. If their popularity with the general public wasn’t convincing enough evidence of their importance, the sales of the record they were working on in tandem with their tour certainly would be.

Beatlemania Swept North America After Swedish Critic Wrote Them Off

Regardless of whether The Beatles (or the Swedish music critic) were having a bad night in October 1963, sales of their sophomore release, With the Beatles, undoubtedly verified the group as very, very musically important. The album was The Beatles’ first North American release, coming out in Canada one month after the band finished their tour of Sweden. Capitol split these songs into two releases, Meet the Beatles! and The Beatles’ Second Album, in the U.S. In their native U.K., The Beatles’ record performed exceptionally well, becoming the second album to sell a million copies after the 1958 soundtrack to South Pacific.

The Beatles were already at the top of the British charts with Please Please Me, and the addition of With the Beatles meant that they spent a whopping 51 consecutive weeks at No. 1. No other band or artist has achieved that same feat. Even with multiple releases, The Beatles were also performing well across the pond. Beatlemania was effectively taking over the world, regardless of what the Nya Wemlands Tidning had to say about it.

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