Tomorrow Never Knows: How creativity enabled The Beatles to shape the 1960s and influence generations

Abstract

This thesis examines the historical development and subsequent cultural and political impact of The Beatles from their formative years to the group’s breakup. It shows how their creative arc led them to become a global inspiration during the 1960s, positioning them as catalysts in debates about art, culture, and politics. The study employs creativity as a unifying lens to link practice, reception, and legacy, exploring the emergent creativity that underpins the group’s individual and collective transformation, which has previously not been fully explored. This thesis addresses that gap in Beatles studies. Analytically, the thesis identifies the drivers of The Beatles’ creativity and explains how The Beatles’ practice intersected with the decade’s sociocultural and sociopolitical shifts. Adopting a systems perspective, it argues that creativity is historically contingent and context-responsive. Methodologically, it combines cross-disciplinary textual and archival analysis with a reflexive, creativity-informed approach, as well as a thematic analysis of thirty-seven semi-structured interviews with musicians and creative practitioners. The participants’ testimonies show The Beatles operating as tacit mentors: conferring permission to experiment, transmitting portable methods and modelling an ethos that fuses popularity with artistic seriousness. Empirically, the thesis charts a five-phase creative trajectory from 1957 to 1970, demonstrating bidirectional feedback between The Beatles’ practice and 1960s cultural currents. Conceptually, it proposes a permission–encouragement–guidance (PEG) ecology that explains how supportive fields validated the band’s experimentation, turning individual risk-taking into a systemic practice. The research also offers an interpretation of The Beatles’ output from 1965 to 1970, when they developed a cumulative model of protest in which pleasure and provocation co-inhabit mainstream forms.