Decca Records turned the Beatles down.
They auditioned on 1 January 1962, but the label signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead. A year later the Beatles recorded their first album in a single day, elsewhere.
The event
More amazing facts
- 1961 Gagarin flew into space in April 1961; that August, the Berlin Wall went up.
- 1961 A space dog's daughter lived in the White House.
- 1961 · 1971 Gagarin landed separately from his capsule, by parachute, after ejecting at 7 km. FAI rules then required a pilot to land inside his craft for a record, and the USSR admitted the truth only in 1971.
- 1961 The first people to greet a man back from space were a farm worker and her granddaughter.
- 1963 Valentina Tereshkova is the only woman ever to fly in space alone.
- 1963 The Moscow–Washington hotline was once cut by a Finnish farmer's plough and another time by a Danish bulldozer.