"Sexual intercourse was initiated/in nineteen sixty-three.../between the end of the Chatterley ban/and the Beatles' first album".
So wrote Philip Larkin in the poem Anus Mirabilis (Annus Mirabilis) from 1967, describing the transformation of British society during the early 1960s.
It was just the beginning of a liberating cultural revolution that would eventually sweep the whole world, all with "debauched" London at its source.
Piri Halaz, a correspondent for Time magazine, managed to vividly portray the atmosphere:
"In a decade marked by the dominance of the young, London has blossomed... The city is ruled by girls and the Beatles, buzzing with small cars and TV stars and pulsating veins brimming with excitement," she wrote in April 1966.
"London is not selfish, it exports plays, films, fashion and all styles and all its people".
The music of the Beatles and the James Bond films played a major role in this era of the latest cultural exports.
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These two huge cultural phenomena will help redefine Britain and "Britishness" for a receptive global audience.
They were born, believe it or not, on the same day - October 5, 1962 - with the release of the Beatles' first single (Love Me Do) and the premiere of the first James Bond film (Doctor No).
This coincidence went completely unnoticed at the time, but the world we live in is still enjoying the aftershocks to this day.
Just like Ian McDonald wrote in the book A revolution in the head, his important historical review of Beatles records in the 1960s, the release of the song Love Me Do "swept an inspired autumn breeze through the weak pop scene, ushering in changes in the tone of post-war life in Britain, coinciding with the appearance of the first James Bond film".
In Britain itself, the years following the end of World War II were marked by asceticism, and the Suez Crisis of 1956 only painfully demonstrated that the United Kingdom was no longer the military or political superpower it had long been considered to be.
"Britain at that moment needed a new story and a new way of knowing itself," said John Higgs, author of the book Love and Let Others Die: Bond, The Beatles and the British Soul, for BBC Culture.
"During the last couple of centuries, we knew what we were - a global empire. We told ourselves that Britain ruled the seas and that the sun never set on the British Empire.
"Our identity has disappeared. We needed a new one. And that's where Bond and the Beatles - as well as embracing the modern world - become part of the game. They are examples of what we wanted to be."
The sudden decline of the empire, together with the strengthening of the consumer society, prepared the ground for a radical transformation of British values, which was dominated by popular culture.
As representatives of the working class and musicians from the north of England with no formal musical education, the Beatles shattered all preconceptions about where art could come from.
Their original appearance was surprisingly androgynous, their accent unmitigated, while their followers adored them.
"Their unique sound and look suggested to a young audience that success didn't have to be off the beaten path," says Kristin Feldman-Barrett, author Women's Histories of the Beatles for BBC Culture.
"The Beatles showed that new expression and redirection of talent - regardless of origin - can be a winning combination. For 1962, that was a powerful message. It seemed to be the harbinger of the future.
"And considering the role of young women in the early history of the band - first of all, we mean their loyal female audience - it was also a future in which women played a key role.
"In this new, colorful world, symbolized by the Beatles, everyone mattered and was welcome to be part of the fun."
Song Love Me Do reached the 17th place in the British charts and that was only the first step in a meteoric rise to previously unrecorded heights and fame.
The British establishment was unaware of what had hit it.
Conservative politician Ted Heath, future Prime Minister, snobbishly declared in 1963 that he found it very difficult to recognize the accent of the Liverpool lads as "the Queen's English".
John Lennon replied: "We will not vote for Ted".
Two years later, Heath's party was swept out of power, while the Beatles went to Buckingham Palace to receive decorations.
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Bond and the Beatles
Like the Beatles, the film James Bond also established a new model of British life.
In Fleming's Bond novels (the first being Casino Royale from 1953), he was portrayed as a decidedly reactionary figure.
It was only the casting of Sean Connery, a working-class actor who was a one-time bodybuilder from Edinburgh, that transformed Bond from the big screen into a dynamic and modern hero who was ready for the 1960s.
Film producer Albert 'Kabi' Broccoli wrote in his autobiography:
"Physically, and generally, as a personality, he was too raw to be a replica of Fleming's upper-class agent. That suited us, because we intended to make Agent 007 much more palatable to the audience that went to the cinemas".
Thus was born a modern action hero who combined a classic English sense of style with a transatlantic nonchalance and who was completely different from the decadent and aristocratic "gentleman hero" of earlier British thrillers, such as Bulldog Drummond.
Some film buffs were confused by Connery's regional accent, just as in the case of Heath and the Beatles.
"If you pay attention to the American reviews of Doctor No, you will notice that they were unable to recognize the accent and thought it was an Irish accent," says Lievela Chapman, author of the book Modeling James Bond for BBC Culture.
Connery's first film appearance Doctor No it certainly ranks among the best introductions to a character in the history of cinema.
Our stylish hero is at the gambling table in Mayfair's exclusive Ambassador Casino.
"The audience gets to know him slowly, first studying his suit and location before seeing Connery's face.
"So he's defined by a penchant for quality, from clothes and casinos to relationships with beautiful women," says Chapman.
As a suave and sexually liberated citizen of the world, Bond was the perfect fantasy character for the new age of flying jets and using birth control pills.
Indeed, director Terence Young felt that timing played a key role in the film's financial success.
"I think we have not only landed in the right year, but also in the right month and week of that year," he was quoted in James Chapman's book License to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films.
While it seems obvious why the exotic adventures of Bond and the inspirational tunes of the Beatles appealed to teenagers in post-war Britain, their global success was more significant for their lasting legacy.
They represented a British identity that was younger and, more importantly, friendlier than the helmeted colonizers who had exported the British way of life centuries before.
Symbol of Britain
By the time their invasion of the American charts began in early 1964, The Beatles had already conquered Europe and were beginning to turn to Oceania and Asia.
Thanks to their influence, young people around the world adopted the distinctive hairstyles and fashion styles of London's West End tailors, but this cultural exchange was not one-way.
Ultimately, rock 'n' roll was an African-American art form, and that influence was enthusiastically highlighted by John Lennon in a 1972 interview with the African-American weekly Jet.
Since 1966, the Beatles have embraced Indian culture, primarily at the initiative of guitarist George Harrison, and this has significantly helped popularize yoga and meditation throughout the Western world.
The band's openness to the new and radically different represented their strength, but their subversive influence, especially on the youth, was not always welcome.
The Soviet Union banned Beatles records, while the Ku Klux Klan publicly burned them.
In Japan, protestors were offended because the Beatles performed in the sacred Nippon Budokan, so they sent death threats because of it.
Even James Bond himself, the self-proclaimed arbiter of good taste, chimed in by appearing in the third 007 film. Goldfinger (1964) lamented that drinking warm champagne "is as bad as listening to the Beatles without earplugs".
But no one could stop this tide - the Beatles left behind an unstoppable trail of youthful energy that will follow all future generations of pop stars.
Bond's position as a symbol of "Britishness" was somewhat more problematic.
As Her Majesty's fierce agent, Bond represented an explicit projection of imperial power that arrived just as Britain's ability to maintain that power in the real world began to fade.
It is no doubt much more noticeable in the film Doctor No but in the sequels that followed, because the mission took him to Jamaica, which was then counting its last days as a British colony.
The very idea that MI6 had a real or moral right to be the world's policeman was already mere fantasy in 1962, but it was also a vision that many people found attractive and reassuring, especially in light of the real decline and in contrast to the rise of the United States.
So Jeremy Black in the book James Bond politics notes that "the steadfastly capable agent 007 offers protection from various criminal organizations and, more generally, serves to support traditional notions of Britain and to support notions of an efficient, new Britain".
In addition, the alluring power of the Bond lifestyle has earned him fans around the world.
Thus, Time magazine announced in June 1965: "There seem to be no geographical limits to the appeal of sex, violence and snobbery with which Fleming has endowed the British secret agent," and then called him "the greatest mass cult hero of the decade."
The term "Bondmania", derived from "Beatlemania", described the general craze for the Bond films and products related to them, from music records from the films to children's toys and 007-branded cufflinks and shirts.
Bond's world of luxury and hedonism was no longer reserved only for the oppressive elite, as is already discussed in the book Bond and Beyond said by Tony Bennett and Janet Woolacott:
"In the context of 'playful Britain', Bond produced a mythic embodiment of the then prominent themes of classless society and modernization," they wrote.
"It was a key cultural moment for the claim that Britain had moved away from the narrow-minded, class perspective of traditional, ruling elites and entered into a process of modernization as a result of the implementation of a new, meritocratic style of middle-class cultural and political leadership and professionalism, rather than aristocratic and amateurish".
The Beatles, meanwhile, became the guiding star for an entire generation of musical talent.
In a recent BBC documentary series My Life as a Rolling Stone, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards acknowledge the Beatles' influence on their early albums, particularly the single Love Me Do, and inspiration to write their own pop songs.
Wherever the Beatles went, others followed; and two years after their legendary appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, British artists who looked and sounded just like the Fantastic Four continued to dominate the US charts.
In the mid-1960s, there was also an explosion of spy films and TV series produced on the model of James Bond films.
Some of them, for example Ipkres file (The Ippress File) by Sidney J. Fury and The Spy Who Came From Leeward (The Spy Who Came In From the Cold) by Martin Ritt (both from 1965), stood out as films dominated by a more realistic tone, unlike the Bond films.
Some others, such as series Matt Helm (catapulted by Dina Martina), they had no such ambitions.
In the biography of the Bond films Some kind of hero, compiled by Matthew Field and Ajay Chaudhry, they write:
"If James Bond was made in the manner of the Beatles, then the Matt Helm series can be said to have modeled itself on Mankis (The Monkeys).
Even the Beatles themselves tried to grab a piece of the Bond pie, hence their film Help! (Help!) from 1965, kind of looked like a parody of the Agent 007 movies.
This trend culminated in a kind of cynical apotheosis in Italian cinema Okay Connery (OK Connery) in which Sean's brother Neil played the lead role.
Six decades later, however, Bond and the Beatles are still the most prominent icons of the era.
James Bond is currently the longest running film series in history.
No time to die, the 25th Bond film in a row, arrived in theaters in 2021 and became the most watched film in the post-Covid cinema era.
A few months later, in June 2022, Paul McCartney was one of the main stars of the Glastonbury festival with a concert dominated by Beatles songs.
The secret of this longevity is not a secret. "At the end of the day, it must be because they were good," says John Higgins.
"Artists and creators create works that then plunge into the great lake of culture, and successful works float until the moment when they inevitably sink into the dark depths.
"Rarely, they resurface, and when they do, we know that they are not works that were created only for their time, but that they belong to all times.
"They have been addressing us for decades. That can only happen to things that are good."
The Beatles themselves might recoil at the idea that their mantra of peace and love had anything to do with the violence and destruction brought to the big screen by the Bond films.
Nevertheless, together these two modern institutions have woven a new national myth not only of a benign and exciting, but also of a downright cool Britain.
A new cultural giant emerged from the ashes of the former empire.
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