the Beatles in Britain from 1962, a number of Liverpool performers were able to follow them into the charts, including Gerry & The Pacemakers, The Searchers, and Cilla Black. Among the most successful beat acts from Birmingham were The Spencer Davis Group and The Moody Blues; The Animals came from Newcastle, and Them, featuring Van Morrison, from Belfast. From London, the term Tottenham Sound was largely based around The Dave Clark Five, but other London bands that benefited from the beat boom of this era included the Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Yardbirds. The first non-Liverpool, non-Brian Epstein-managed band to break through in the UK were Freddie and the Dreamers, who were based in Manchester, as were Herman's Hermits and The Hollies. The beat movement provided most of the bands responsible for the British invasion of the American pop charts in the period after 1964, and furnished the model for many important developments in pop and rock music, particularly through their small group format - typically lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar, and drums, sometimes replacing the rhythm guitar with keyboards, either with a lead singer or with one of the musicians taking lead vocals and the others providing vocal harmonies. British blues boom In parallel with beat music, in the late 1950s and early 1960s a British blues scene was developing recreating the sounds of American R&B and later particularly the sounds of bluesmen Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters. Initially led by purist blues followers such as Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, it reached its height of mainstream popularity in the 1960s, when it developed a distinctive and influential style dominated by electric guitar and made international stars of several proponents of the genre including The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, Cream, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin (who morphed out of The Yardbirds). A number of these moved through Blues-rock to different forms of rock music, with increasing emphasis on technical virtuosity and improvisational skills. As a result, British blues helped to form many of the subgenres of rock, including psychedelic rock and heavy metal music. Since then direct interest in the blues in Britain has declined, but many of the key performers have returned to it in recent years, new acts have emerged and there has been a renewed interest in the genre. The Beatles and the "British Invasion" The Beatles themselves were less