Music
Five real newspaper headlines about music, printed between 1964 and 1991, with their dates removed. Read each one and guess the year it was published. There is no multiple choice — just the story as it was reported at the time, and your ear for the era.
They run from the night the Beatles arrived in America to the record that ended one decade of rock and started another. Headlines publishes a new five-headline history quiz every day.
Headline one
New York Daily News
1964
Two months after the Kennedy assassination, four musicians from Liverpool played to the largest television audience in American history to that point. The British Invasion dates from that Sunday evening, and so does the modern idea of a band as a global commercial force.
Headline two
New York Times
1965
Bob Dylan walked onto the Newport Folk Festival stage with an electric band and played three songs. Accounts still differ over whether the booing was for the amplification, the sound quality or the short set — but the split between folk authenticity and rock ambition never really healed.
Headline three
Memphis Commercial Appeal
1977
He was found at Graceland on 16 August. The same summer produced punk in Britain and disco at its commercial peak, so his death landed at the exact moment the music he had started was being pulled apart by everything that came after it.
Headline four
The Sun
1985
Two stadiums, sixteen hours, and a satellite broadcast reaching an estimated 1.9 billion people. Queen's twenty-minute set is routinely voted the greatest live performance in rock history, and the day established the charity mega-concert as a permanent fixture.
Headline five
Rolling Stone
1991
The album displaced Michael Jackson at the top of the American charts in January of the following year. Within months the dominant sound of mainstream rock had changed, major labels were signing anything from the Pacific Northwest, and a genre that had ruled the decade was finished.
Answer the five above to see your score.
Scoring works as it does in the daily game. Each headline is worth up to 100 points, and you lose two points for every year you are out. Being a decade wrong still earns you 80. A perfect round is 500.
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