For Le Monde, the Beatles began as "a racket" – just a noise complained about by the neighbors of the Casbah, one of the Liverpool basements where the band first played. One detractor, whose name this paper had the decency to withhold, described their music as "hyena cries". Le Monde's London correspondent Henri Pierre, in a long article published on December 12, 1963, was the first at the paper to report on the craze for a music born in the great English port city and described as "the Mersey sound," after its famous river.

Between quotes from cranky local residents, he described a musical trend "brought to the four corners of the country by a young rock quartet, now millionaires, the Beatles". The journalist described the meteoric rise of George, John, Ringo and Paul, the "tribal frenzy" that had sprung up around the group, the young girls who "fainted and went into convulsions"...

The article focused above all on the popular, working-class roots of the band and the young people who listened to it. And so it was that, long after they had entered the charts, Beatlemania found its way to the pages of Le Monde. Sixty years on from that article, the group's popularity continues unabated, as evidenced by the success of Now and Then, an unreleased, unfinished track whose launch on Thursday, November 2, was achieved with the help of artificial intelligence. The song immediately shot to the top of the UK charts.

While successive music critics of Le Monde have paid tribute to the iconic band since their breakup in 1970, the same could not be said in their early days. In fact, none of the band's albums were reviewed in this newspaper at the time of their release. A few weeks after Pierre, on January 18, 1964, Claude Sarraute reported on the Beatles concert in Paris at the Olympia. "Four knights of 'rock' in shining iron-grey armor, with sweet bangs, childlike cheeks, perfectly relaxed, cheerful, happy. The noise, in this temple of twist, reached fever pitch. It became hard to tell where the yelps and screams were coming from. The Beatles flew over our bowed heads, louder than a city subway, when suddenly, miraculously, there was silence: in other words, the sound system broke down. There they were, gesticulating but unable to make a sound. Problem repaired, they took off again... spitting, belching and vibrating."

The journalist concluded: "I left there staggering, dazed, my brain in knots, surprised to find the hushed calm of the street; a fine example, nonetheless, of what is commonly called the civilization of noise."

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