The podcast version is also available, it’s just me on my own.
I was never much into The Beatles when I was younger.
I never understood what all the fuss was about, it seemed to be one of those things that, like England’s 1966 World Cup triumph, my parents’ generation went on and on (and on!) about, but felt like ancient history to me.
The Beatles sounded old-fashioned and mediocre, indistinguishable from George Formby leaning on a lamppost banging on about cleaning windows, or Vera Lynn crooning about meeting again – fine in its day, but of little relevance to a super-cool teenager in the 1980s. Or to me. Their case wasn’t bolstered by Paul McCartney singing along with a chorus of cartoon frogs.
That all changed when I heard the blue compilation album, and was blown away by Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and A Day in the Life, and, turning on a sixpence, decided The Beatles were brilliant after all. I’d always found their story compelling, and found them engaging as characters, but at that moment I got the music too and became a bit of a Beatles buff.
And when I get obsessed with things, I go the whole hog, and tend to go on and on (and on!) … see my Beatles walk here, for example.
They started in early 1956, when inspired by Lonnie Donegan’s skiffle music – a kind of ramshackle folk that didn’t require virtuoso musicianship – John Lennon formed The Quarry Men (named after his school Quarry Bank) with a group of friends.
Skiffle made such an impact because it was a kind of popular music that didn’t require a high-level of skill, and so opened up the playing of music to the masses – suddenly anyone could be a musician! Before that, playing music was mainly the reserve of experts, and pop music – such as it existed – was created by adults for younger people the way other creative art forms were, like Enid Blyton’s books or Disney’s films – hence safe, well-mannered and grateful stars like Cliff Richard flourished, although Elvis and the American rock’n’rollers like Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly had started to challenge that.
The original Quarry Men were Lennon as lead singer, lead guitarist and band leader, his best friend Pete Shotton on washboard, Eric Griffiths on guitar, Rod Davis on banjo and Ivan Vaughan, a childhood friend who had gone to Liverpool Institute rather than Quarry Bank (sent there by his parents to specifically avoid the bad influence of John Lennon), on occasional tea-chest bass whenever his friend Len Garry didn’t turn up. Later Colin Hanton joined on drums, because – having left school and got a job – he had enough money to buy a drum kit.
In July 1957, Ivan Vaughan brought a friend from Liverpool Institute to the local fete where The Quarry Men were playing, thinking his friend – a boy called Paul McCartney – might be interested. McCartney met Lennon after the show and played a few songs, explaining to Lennon that he was playing banjo chords and showing him the guitar equivalents. Despite this threat to Lennon’s dominance of the band, he concluded McCartney would be a good addition, and invited him to join on guitar.
This coincided with the band’s move away from the waning craze of skiffle, accelerated by Rod Davis drifting off as they left school and set out on different paths. A skiffle band without a banjo player didn’t make much sense, but a rock’n’roll band didn’t need one, and so the band became a beat band playing rock’n’roll.
Later, as the others also drifted off into other lives, McCartney’s friend George Harrison joined and so The Quarry Men, became the base from which The Beatles would emerge.
By 1959 they were down to the core three of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, and in January 1960, following various name changes – including Johnny and the Moondogs – were joined by John’s art school friend Stuart Sutcliffe on bass. By then they were called The Beatals, a nod to the insect-themed backing band of Buddy Holly (the Crickets) and with a pun on the word “beat”. This would evolve to The Silver Beetles, then The Silver Beatles and finally to The Beatles – an unusual name given the standard of the day was to have a Singer and the Backing Band structure to band names, with the backing band often anonymous and interchangeable – The Beatles broke this mould, not just with the name, but with every member of the band being well-known and them not having any single leader, or even single lead singer.
For a while they had irregular drummers, including Tommy Moore, Norman Chapman and even Paul McCartney, until Pete Best joined ahead of their first booking in Hamburg – Best’s mother ran The Casbah Club, a Liverpool club where The Beatles played regularly, so his contribution to their early success was greater than just occupying the drum stool.
From 1960 to 1962 they became favourites of Liverpool’s emerging Merseybeat scene, and played various residencies in Hamburg. Club owners in that German city were keen to take advantage of the rock’n’roll boom and with no German bands available, and the US too far away, they came to the UK where a combination of flourishing art schools and the lack of national service meant there were hundreds of aspiring rock’n’roll bands looking for gigs.
In Hamburg they met Klaus Voormann and Astrid Kirchherr (who would later get engaged to Stuart Sutcliffe). Voormann and Kirchherr were instrumental in helping the band develop their style, especially their longer “existential-style” hair (based on French fashions), and a musically-inspired Voormann would go on to play bass with Manfred Mann and later on Lennon’s solo work as part of the Plastic Ono Band. They also met musicians like Billy Preston and fellow Liverpudlians Rory Storm and the Hurricanes in Hamburg, both of whom would become important in The Beatles future: Preston would play with them, most notably on Let it Be, and Rory Storm – real name Alan Caldwell – had a drummer called Richard Starkey who was playing under the pseudonym Ringo Starr.
Sutcliffe, never happy as a musician, left in 1961 to focus on his art and spend time with Kirchherr, and so McCartney grudgingly switched to bass and The Beatles became a four-piece. The following year Sutcliffe tragically died of a brain haemorrhage.
By 1962 they were the most popular Merseybeat band, and with NEMS record store owner Brian Epstein now their manager, they got auditions at Decca and Parlophone. They famously failed the former, but the producer at Parlophone – an EMI label focussed mostly on spoken word recordings such as The Goons – was George Martin, and he saw potential in their rough-and-ready rock’n’roll and cheeky charisma, and gave them a chance. He didn’t rate Pete Best’s drumming though, and suggested they use a session drummer. Instead the Beatles fired Best and replaced him their friend Ringo from Rory Storm’s band (Ringo had filled in for Best a few times already, so knew the group and the material), but Martin wasn’t that impressed with the replacement either, and used a session drummer anyway (Andy White), although in the end the Love Me Do version they released as their debut single is with Ringo (although some reissues were the Andy White version).
And so, we have the line-up:
- John Lennon – vocals, guitar, piano
- Paul McCartney – vocals, bass, piano, guitar
- George Harrison – guitar, vocals
- Ringo Starr – drums, vocals
1963: Please Please Me
Ranking: 10th
The impact The Beatles made on the scene wasn’t just their music – as fresh and fun as that was – it was their look and their attitude. Four funny cheeky long-haired irreverent boys, a band personality that was an extension of Lennon’s own witty edginess, who were also British with regional accents, down-to-earth, and playing young people’s music directly to young people. They weren’t hand-picked and controlled by grown-ups, grateful to be given the opportunity, they were the real deal, a self-contained unit that composed, played and sang their own material – they didn’t crank out Tin Pan Alley formulas, nor were they the shop window of a money-spinning hit factory like Motown, they were four charismatic kids from Liverpool playing their own version of rock’n’roll with harmony-vocals, reminiscent of the Motown girl groups like The Marvelettes and The Shirelles.
Please Please Me was recorded in a day, and it shows. Some of the musicianship is shockingly bad – with the Top Notes (via The Isley Brothers) cover Twist and Shout only saved by Lennon’s extraordinary vocal performance. Most of the tracks are perfectly fine (P.S. I Love You excepted) but sound dated and being paper-thin pop, there’s not much that stands the test of time – Paul’s I Saw Her Standing There the exception.
1963: With the Beatles
Ranking: 11th
No-one knew how long The Beatles would last – most music stars managed a few hits of throwaway bubblegum pop, and then faded into obscurity, plugging the cabaret circuit for the rest of their careers while the record companies counted their swag. There was virtually no precedent for a group to last for years in the spotlight, and certainly no precedent for the talent to call the shots – hence another rushed effort with most eyes fixed on the quick money it would generate.
It’s not noticeably worse than its predecessor, it’s just more of the same but without the couple of standout tracks (although also without P.S. I Love You, so that’s a plus).
1964: A Hard Day’s Night
Ranking: 8th
Up to this point, Beatles records were thrashed out albums at breakneck speed and clogged with cover versions, but A Hard Day’s Night – a phrase Ringo accidentally invented and John had already used in his writing – was the first record that was more considered in composition and recording, and made up of entirely Lennon-McCartney tracks.
The movie was another rush effort to cash in on The Beatles craze, and it isn’t great (and has some cringeworthy moments), but it is a fun attempt to capture Beatlemania, and is where George Harrison meets Patti Boyd who would go on to become his (and later Eric Clapton’s) wife.
Musically it’s a massive step forward. I suspect Beatles nay-sayers who sniffily held the band had no talent had to keep their heads down when this came out, and given we’re only fifteen months since the release of their debut, it’s quite hard to understand how they produced something so remarkably good. It’s still patchy, it’s still dated, it’s not something I’d listen to very often, but the quality of songs like the title track and Can’t Buy Me Love are so far ahead of where they were a little over a year earlier, it’s breathtaking … and yes, people are still talking about that opening chord.
1964: Beatles For Sale
Ranking: 12th
A tired and formulaic album from a band contractually obliged to bang out two albums a year. It’s their first real step backwards, peppered with cover versions and even the Lennon-McCartney compositions are a bit weak compared to their other stuff – Eight Days a Week the exception to that.
If I’d been around at the time, I’d have told them to ditch the covers and include some re-recorded re-worked older non-album singles to fill out the space, but no-one listens to me.
1965: Help!
Ranking: 9th
Their second movie is a dreadful film, unless you are under the age of five, although it does showcase Ringo’s skills as an actor, but the music is back to where we left off after A Hard Day’s Night, plus Yesterday – the most covered song in music history – although not a favourite of mine, it was the first time a song was just one Beatle, and showing their palette was broader that four guys banging out pop tunes.
I wouldn’t describe this as much of a step forward, just more back on track, but this and every album above it in my list remain listenable even today.
1965: Rubber Soul
Ranking: 4th
Refusing to make another film they – for the first time – had a gap in their diaries, and decided to take their time to make a proper album. Their fans were growing up with them, they had a bit more money in their pockets and could afford albums now, not just singles, and so the idea that an album could itself be an artform – not just a collection of songs plonked in one place – started to take shape and hearing this album was the reason Brian Wilson put down his surfboard and wrote Pet Sounds.
Not just that, bands had short shelf lives, and they were expected to do one thing. You do rock’n’roll, or you croon ballads, or you’re a pop boy band or whatever – you sell a product that is predictable and marketable, you don’t become an artistic collective that does what the hell it feels like! The Beatles had opened the door to bands composing their own material and calling their own shots; by 1965 they were showing that bands could range across genres and write proper grown-up artistic stuff too if they wanted.
Rubber Soul is their first album that is genuinely completely enjoyable even today. The fact that it took a lot longer to make than their previous albums shows … more and varied instrumentation, smarter techniques and brighter guitars, and – inspired by Bob Dylan and the desire to move beyond being mere pop stars – the start of much cleverer meaningful lyrics.
This album has Norwegian Wood (with the first appearance of a sitar on a Western pop record), Drive My Car, Nowhere Man, Michelle, In My Life … all just over two years since they hit us with Love Me Do … don’t try to make sense of that, you can’t.
1966: Revolver
Ranking: 3rd
It was around this time they decided to stop touring, a momentous decision that changed everything. No longer were they living together in their little bubble, needing to compose and record at breakneck speed and then crack on with the next live dates, suddenly they had time and space. Lennon, Harrison and Starr had already moved out to large spacious houses in the distant leafy suburbs, with only McCartney staying in the city and becoming deeply involved in the emerging avant-garde scene.
Things slowed down, Beatlemania ebbed, and their lives, friendships and interests flourished outside of the band. Freed from needing to reproduce their music live, the band found themselves able to experiment to their heart’s content (even with the album cover, which was by their old friend Klaus Voormann) and start to use the studio as a creative tool with things like double tape loops, artificial double tracks and the backwards guitar solo (Harrison on I’m Only Sleeping, directly influencing Hendrix)
This album is usually regarded as better than Rubber Soul because it is more experimental and adventurous, but it also contains the silly singalong children’s song Yellow Submarine that jars with the rest of the album, and crap like Doctor Robert, but then it also contains George’s first really great composition Taxman with Paul’s wonderful driving Duck-Dunn-esque bassline, and it’s got Tomorrow Never Knows and Eleanor Rigby … so yes, it’s imperfect but it’s ground-breaking, ambitious and its high points are stratospheric.
1967: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Ranking: 5th
The Magnum Opus, inspired by Pet Sounds, was originally conceived as an autobiographical album about Liverpool, hence the first two singles being Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, but that idea was abandoned as they instead worked on the album as a satire to cabaret, structured as if it were a live show – an idea Paul had when flying back from Kenya with Mal Evans.
The decision to leave off Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane – arguably their two best songs up to this point – is inexplicable, especially as dross like Good Morning and Lovely Rita were included. The mix of songs is a bit uneven across the whole piece. It starts and ends in utter magnificence, but wanders around a surprisingly mediocre bunch of songs in the middle.
In my view, this is McCartney’s high point: he creates the concept (including how the songs flow into each other), he pushes for the unusual cover and luxurious packaging (including the first to print the lyrics), writes the best songs – stitching together his and John’s A Day in the Life – and leaving John to only really contribute Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (I don’t rate his other contributions on this album very highly).
It was also the first rock album to win the best album Grammy.
1967: Magical Mystery Tour
Ranking: 7th
In August 1967 Brian Epstein was found dead. Not only did they lose their manager and friend, but from this point on they lacked a grown-up father figure telling them what to do. George Martin had long ago accepted The Beatles no longer worked for him, it was he who worked for them, and so we see the first big blunder of their career. Paul McCartney, glowing with confidence after the commercial and critical bombshell of Sgt Pepper, and flexing his leadership muscles (filling the void left by John’s withdrawal into grief and LSD), proves the point that just because you’re good at one thing (music) doesn’t mean you’re any good at another (film), and thus we get this ill-advised parody of the British seaside holiday.
Paul was the driver of this, he directed the film and provided much of the energy, but the others – especially John – fully bought into it. It was only meant as a TV special with an EP-length soundtrack, but in the US it was issued as a full album and it is that version that gets included as official canon these days.
This was also the time when, in an attempt to sort out their shambolic finances, they set up Apple, proving the point that just because you’re good at one thing (music) doesn’t mean you’re any good at another (business).
The album version is made reasonable because of I Am The Walrus, Hello, Goodbye, Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, none of which have anything to do with the film.
1968: The Beatles (“The White Album”)
Ranking: 2nd
The story of this album is wrapped up in what happened to John around this time.
He was struggling with the death of Brian Epstein (losing yet another parental figure), was taking a huge amount of LSD and, feeling trapped and bored in his marriage to Cynthia, was probably depressed. The meditation retreat to Rishikesh turned out to be a great opportunity to write songs and reconnect with the band, and – with plenty of free time and no access to drugs – produce what was arguably the best cluster of songs of his entire career (for example Dear Prudence, Glass Onion, Happiness is a Warm Gun, Julia, I’m So Tired).
This didn’t last long. He had met Yoko Ono already, and was intrigued by her, but it was around this time that it turned serious and he became infatuated with her. This, plus arguments over their ridiculous Apple money-pit and the gaping hole left by Epstein, made him feel like the band were no longer his best mates that gave him respite from his boring domestic life, they were now holding him back from his love affair and shiny new fascination with the avant-garde art world of Yoko Ono. His newly-acquired heroin addiction probably didn’t help much either.
At the same time George Martin was in heavy demand as an independent producer and so often unavailable, and so much of the album is self-produced, with Paul – the bossy perfectionist workaholic – becoming increasingly dominant.
Bands are unstable entities anyway, and with John’s semi-detached disinterest, Ringo feeling like a spare part (he walked out during the recording of the album), and George’s frustration at not being given the creative space he wanted, the process of recording the album was painful, and with business problems from Apple piling up and no manager, it was not a happy time.
There are some songs on the album I loathe (Rocky Raccoon) and although I think this is John’s creative high point, I think the opposite is true of Paul. I won’t mention Rocky Raccoon again because it’s not just that, a lot of his stuff here feels derivative and shallow (with exceptions: Blackbird and Mother Nature’s Son for example). I think the difference was that John’s introspective approach was aided by meditation (and no drugs), whereas Paul’s magpie eye, eagerly soaking up the world around him, was limited by there being very little to observe, leaving him scratching around for inspiration.
Paul always struggled to sing about himself, and was more interested in the outside world and composing through characters. Maybe this gave him a longer shelf-life and broader range, but less depth. This is why John’s peaks were higher and his songs more complex, they were felt inside out, not constructed outside in – but then John ran out of steam fairly quickly as we all got a bit sick of his self-indulgence by the mid-seventies.
Yes, maybe it could have been a single album, but there is something so enjoyable about them having this much elbow room to play with. Space to include nonsense (Wild Honey Pie) and to muck about with songs like Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey and Helter Skelter, and let George’s brilliant While My Guitar Gently Weeps have the space for the guitar solo to unfold and the riff to repeat and repeat … and yes, Revolution 9 is … well, it’s an experiment, and sometimes experiments work, and sometimes you get Revolution 9 … and say what you like about Ringo’s limited technical skills, if you can’t appreciate his creativity and gorgeous drumming after listening to this album, there’s something seriously up with you.
1969: Yellow Submarine
Ranking: 13th
Cobbled together with bits and bobs and George Martin orchestration as a soundtrack to a film they weren’t even in, it’s barely even a Beatles album. It helps me understand how George Harrison was getting sick of the whole thing by this point, having his name attached to projects they had virtually no input into or control over, and barely able to get his songs on albums he was directly involved with. You can see how his patience was running thin by this time.
As an album, it doesn’t really stand up except Hey Bulldog. The film isn’t bad though.
1969: Abbey Road
Ranking: 1st
The final hurrah, a McCartney driven attempt to mop up leftover songs into something coherent, this relatively straightforward album sounds a lot more polished, possibly because George Martin is back in charge and Abbey Road changed from valves to transistors in their amplification and mixing desks.
There are missteps here too, so let’s get Maxwell’s Silver Hammer out the way, and Octopus’s Garden too (sorry Ringo), but everything else is wonderful. George Harrison delivers arguably the best song with Something and the band’s most-streamed song on Spotify Here Comes the Sun (George one of the first to use a Moog synthesiser), and topped off with Paul’s idea to cobble together much of side two into a medley making it one of the best sixteen minutes of recorded music in history, culminating in the Paul, George and John guitar battle – and yes, we even get a drum solo from Ringo!
I don’t think it needed Her Majesty though, for me The End is the end.
1970: Let it Be
Ranking: 6th
Written and recorded before Abbey Road, Let it Be was an ill-conceived folly captured on film by Michael Lindsay Hogg (and polished up brilliantly by Peter Jackson in the Get Back films). The Beatles hadn’t enjoyed recording The White Album, and were drifting apart without the parental direction of Epstein. They were closing in on 30, in serious relationships, had other friendship groups and musical interests outside the band, and their differing personalities – once hidden beneath youth and the excitement of success – were now blatantly obvious as they snapped and snagged on each other, exacerbated as they wrestled with the disaster that was Apple and the question of who should manage the band and The Beatles business going forward.
The original idea of the album was to compose and record it in two weeks then play it live somewhere, all while being filmed (hence the rooftop concert, their final ever concert, at the end of the film). This didn’t make much sense. Paul – now unequivocally filling the leadership vacuum vacated by Epstein’s death and Lennon’s drug use and laziness – wanted to play live again and wanted fresh innovative ideas to keep the band going. George wanted creative freedom to do his own thing and was bored of being a Beatle, John wanted to muck about with Yoko and lean into his Dylan-like voice-of-the-generation concept he had about himself, and Ringo – also bored and feeling out on a limb as they barely needed him any more – would passively, but good-humouredly, go along with whatever they decided, but he wasn’t going to provide any impetus.
Yet they still produce an album’s worth of very good music – no, it’s not their best, but if you go by the far superior Naked remix of the album, which is much closer to what they recorded and what they intended, then it’s actually very good indeed. My ranking is influenced by that … the Phil Spector-produced 1970 release is a shocking mess that didn’t even include Don’t Let Me Down, but that was an Allen Klein money-grab supported by John to annoy Paul – so for me the Naked version is canon, and that’s what I’m ranking.
The final ranking of The Beatles albums:
- Abbey Road (1969)
- The Beatles (The White Album) (1968)
- Revolver (1966)
- Rubber Soul (1965)
- Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
- Let It Be (1970)
- Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
- A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
- Help! (1965)
- Please Please Me (1963)
- With The Beatles (1963)
- Beatles for Sale (1964)
- Yellow Submarine (1969)
MrJohn 