Beatles fever hits small Swedish town

A small Swedish town set the stage for the Beatles' first ever gig outside the UK, a fact celebrated half a century later, despite local press at the time dubbing it an "amateur jig".

Autumn 1963. Bengt-Åke Bengtsson and some 20 female admirers waited for the British band to alight at Arlanda airport, near Stockholm. There were nine gigs on the calender, inlcuding a stop in Karlstad. "An amateur jig," wrote a less-than-impressed critic in the pages of the local newspaper, Nya Wermlands-Tidningen. Bengtsson, however, disagreed "I think that's utterly wrong. The Beatles came along with something new," Bengtsson told the TT news agency on Wednesday. "It was fantastic, novel and fresh. And it wasn't just the music - it was the clothes, the hair, the chat." 

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Source: The Local, Sweden

Photo Credit: Jan Collsioo/TT