The children of the 21st century are still listening to The Beatles

It’s more than half a century since The Beatles broke up, 43 years since John Lennon was murdered, and almost 22 since George Harrison passed to the next world, but in that time the Fab industry has been relentless, respectfully - mostly - but efficiently mining a legacy generated in those ten years between 1960 and 1970 when they were originally making music together.

Next Thursday we’ll get to hear what has been pitched as the band’s “final” recording with the release of Now And Then, an apparently lost demo that Lennon recorded onto a cassette at home in New York in 1977. In 1994, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono gave the tape to then-surviving Beatles Paul McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr, who were able to recover their bandmate’s voice from other demos, add their own and instruments, and release the songs Free As A Bird and Real Love as singles in 1995 and 1996, part of The Beatles Anthology project. 

Now And Then was also on the tape, but technical limitations at the time prevented Lennon’s vocals from being adequately recovered. But now, using the same AI technology Peter Jackson used to isolate dialogue in Get Back, his epic 2021 documentary series about the making of the Let It Be album, it will be released next week as “the last Beatles song”. It features Lennon’s original vocals from the tape, along with guitar added by Harrison in 1995 (before the project was abandoned in the belief that the track was unsalvageable). Last year, Starr recorded the drums with McCartney adding bass, guitar and piano. String arrangements from Eleanor Rigby, Because and Here, There And Everywhere were worked into the mix. 

The finished track will be officially made public next Thursday, with a full release on Friday. A 12-minute film - Now And Then - The Last Beatles Song - will premiere on The Beatles’ YouTube channel on Wednesday, telling the story of how the single came about.

There had been rumours for a while of an unreleased Beatles song coming out, and a rough version of Now And Then was said to be available online, but next week’s official release of the single commences a new wave of commercial activity for the Fabs, which will see fifth - and expanded - reissues of the legendary ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Beatles compilation albums, respectively covering 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, going on sale on 10 November (handily the day before my birthday... 😉). 

Originally released in April 1973, the new, improved and expanded editions of the albums will include Now And Then and comprise various packages, including a six-LP 180g vinyl option and a four-CD version. All 75 songs have been newly remixed in stereo by Giles (son of George) Martin and Sam Okell at Abbey Road using the ‘de-mixing’ technology used for the recent reissues of individual Beatles albums. Of course, with the exception of Now And Then, everything on the two albums will already reside in most Beatle fans’ record collections, but that won’t stop them being acquired again for some 35 extra tracks not included in previous releases, with greater inclusion from the Revolver, ‘White’, Abbey Road and Let It Be albums.

Of course, this is another cash grab by a band that, despite existing for that relatively brief ten-year period, and disbanding more than half a century ago, has become one of the most enduring franchises in entertainment. Which isn’t all that new: in 1964, their canny then-manager, Brian Epstein, negotiated a $10,000 fee for the band to make three appearances on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show. Even in 1964, that wasn’t a particularly large sum of money, but Epstein’s deal ensured that their US TV debut was seen by a record 73 million viewers, giving the band unprecedented commercial exposure and launching the ‘British Invasion’, from which they profited handsomely (though, you could argue, costing John Lennon his life just 16 years later).

Interviewed by CNBC a few years ago, former Philadelphia news anchor Larry Kane, who covered The Beatles on their 1964 and 1965 US tours, said the band could never have imagined how long - or how lucrative - their careers would turn out to be. “It was always a big question for them: when was the bubble going to burst? I don’t think they had any idea it would go on like this. I asked Brian Epstein in 1964 how long it would last. He said ‘Larry, the children of the 21st century will be listening to the Beatles.’ He was right.”

Experts will attribute this longevity to the fact that The Beatles were, to use marketingspeak, ‘first movers’, establishing their brand in a way matched only by the Rolling Stones. Following that Ed Sullivan debut, Gretsch and Rickenbacker guitars, as used by the band, flew out of American musical instrument shops, the start of an entire industry in replica Beatle ‘mop top’ wigs, collarless suits, Yellow Submarine toys - you name it. Now, however, we’re well used to bands manufactured for pure profit, but even if, in hindsight, The Beatles were the marketeer’s dream back in October 1962 when Love Me Do came out - four clean-cut young lads from working class Liverpool, singing simple songs about romance. When billboards started appearing in America saying “The Beatles are coming”,  a commercial phenomenon as powerful as Coca-Cola, Ford or McDonalds was about to be unleashed.

63 years after the group’s formation in Liverpool, global Beatlemania has never bitten the dust. The relentless re-releases, compilation albums, physical and multimedia projects and even the incredible Cirque du Soleil Love show in Las Vegas have not only kept the legacy alive, but the tills making money. In fact, taken as a whole, The Beatles’ financial impact continues to eclipse anything or anyone else the music industry has ever produced, with McCartney, Starr, and the estates of Lennon and Harrison, together with The Beatles’ holding company, finding myriad opportunities to leverage the Fab brand that were never available to the band when they were formally together.

The Beatles continue to be the biggest selling music act of all time. Data a decade ago put their total worldwide album sales at more than 600 million (177 million alone in the US, with Elvis Presley behind them on 135 million). Even in 1964 they made the equivalent of $188 million. Paul McCartney is today worth around £650 million, with Ringo Starr worth £247 million, by default making him the world’s wealthiest drummer (though compare this with Taylor Swift who, according to a Bloomberg report yesterday, has just become America’s first billionaire pop star by value).

It was, though, business that contributed to The Beatles’ original collapse as a band: Epstein’s death from an overdose in 1967 let to the organisation behind them entering a tailspin, even if the creativity relented. The year before, the exhausted band had famously given up touring in order to focus on the quality of their music, much to Epstein’s annoyance, who saw them cutting off their noses to spite their commercial teeth. 

Following his death, they lacked the business acumen to manage their finances. The Magical Mystery Tour film was a whimsically distracting box office dud, while the loss-making Apple Boutique took the quartet further into internecine sensitivity (Abbey Road’s You Never Give Me Your Money could well have been a boardroom comment). The looming denouement would come to a head in September 1969 when Lennon informed McCartney and Starr, amid discussions with businessman Allen Klein over renegotiating the band’s contract with EMI, that he was leaving. Just not straightaway. The following April, McCartney counter-announced that he was going to leave. Such discord, of course, is now long forgotten.

“It was the closest we’ll ever come to having [John] back in the room so it was very emotional for all of us,” the now 83-year-old Ringo Starr told journalists about their work on Now And Then. “It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.” McCartney - still considered by many The Beatle who broke up the band - was equally as emotional: “There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” he said of the AI-rendered production. “And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”

The world will have to wait until next Thursday to hear the song and judge for themselves whether it is a worthy addition to the Beatles canon, or just a sentimental paragraph in their lengthy history. It is, though, a history that shows little sign of ending. “Kids are listening today who never have seen Paul or me, they're into the music,” Ringo Starr  told USA Today a decade ago, and he’s still right. “The thing I’m most proud of is the music, not the haircuts. The music is it. That's what will last.”

He’s right. Contrarians will readily say that so-called ‘legacy’ acts like The Beatles are holding up the production line of new music, but I would counter by saying that their music is timeless and artistically classic. Shakespeare may have written his last play 400 years ago, but his work is as relevant and loved today as it was then. Perhaps pretentiously, I’d say The Beatles should be given the same consideration.

Tomorrow never knew

Ask anyone with an opinion on The Beatles to name their favourite Fab Four album and you will never get the same answer twice. One fan’s Sgt. Pepper is another’s Abbey Road; ‘The White Album’ can be interchanged with Rubber Soul; Help! for Let It Be, and so on.

By any measure, the band’s career arc - from their debut single Love Me Do, released 60 years ago this month, until Let It Be, their final record - is one of extraordinary evolution. In just eight years of recorded music - eight years! - they evolved from chirpsome arrival to the wearisome The Long And Winding Road. Between those points they more or less invented progressive rock. I don’t mean songs with interminable guitar solos about ancient myths written in obscure time signatures, but music that ignored the structural, lyrical and instrumentation conventions of pop that had been established by ‘beat music’ and the original infusions of jazz, blues, soul, country, folk and rock and roll that emerged from 1950s America.

The Beatles’ history is a compressed one. By their third album, A Hard Day’s Night, they had already introduced a harder edge to their infectious pop. By their sixth, 1965’s Rubber Soul, the pressures of relentless touring in their initial ascent found some release in their writing. Coinciding with their recreational introduction to LSD, the record - sometimes melancholy, sometimes whimsical - featured far greater experimentation, such as George Harrison’s use of a sitar on Norwegian Wood or a fuzzbox on Nowhere Man. Lyrically, too, the music was now less about young love and more about adult perspectives on life itself. Rubber Soul wasn’t so much the blueprint for what came next, but it demonstrated a clear desire to exceed the boundaries of conventional pop in the mid-60s.

On Wednesday 6 April, 1966, the greatest creative entity in the history of popular music entered Studio 3 of Abbey Road to commence work on their seventh album. It was to become the record that critics and fans alike would regard as the Looking Glass moment. It was Revolver. It would establish The Beatles as the pre-eminent studio band of their era. They would, of course, give up touring altogether that summer (on the back of the US tour on which John Lennon declared the band “more popular than Jesus,” a remark that didn’t go down well in the Bible Belt). But with the intention to withdraw into the studio already made, the 300 hours they would spend at Abbey Road making Revolver turned Studio 3 into their personal sandpit.

Although Revolver was recorded much as its six predecessors had been, with the band facing each other in a circle on the studio floor, recording ‘as-live’ straight to tape, it’s what came out of those sessions that was less than conventional. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the track that closes Revolver, Tomorrow Never Knows. The basics of it were recorded on that very first day at Abbey Road. Its reverse tape effects, droning background and one of Ringo Starr’s most idiosyncratic drum patterns made a clear statement, from the outset, that the Fabs were searching for alternative experiences, both musically and socially. Remarkably, just three years separate its opening line “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,” from She Loves You, placing down a marker for 1960s counter-culture. “We did [Tomorrow Never Knows] because I, for one, am sick of doing sounds that people can claim to have heard before,” Paul McCartney told the NME at the time the album came out. He could well have been talking about the entire record itself.

Today we get the chance to experience that magic all over again with its reissue as a ‘super-deluxe edition’, curated by Giles Martin, son of George, as he has done for Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles (AKA The White Album). Available in various packages, the reissue expands the original 14-track line-up with the customary phalanx of extras which, to some critics, provides further example of ‘heritage acts’ gouging the hopelessly devoted with baubles like studio outtakes and demos that were left on the cutting room floor in the first place for a reason. 

Revolver maybe the difference. If the exhaustive, engrossing Peter Jackson documentary Get Back demonstrated anything, it was opening the lid on the sometimes laborious work that The Beatles applied to writing their apparently simplistic, sometimes child-like songs, which in reality were anything but simple.

The Revolver reissue contains a brand new stereo mix of the original album produced by Martin and Sam Okell, and it is this that provides the centrepiece attraction. Remixes of classic albums - often by people like my friend Steven Wilson to produce ‘multi-channel’ surround sound versions - are designed to create a different aural experience to the original. Martin’s new Revolver mix cleverly lifts out instrumentation and the band’s individual contributions that had been buried in the original recording due to the fact that in 1966 studios didn’t have the seemingly endless multi-track capabilities they do today.

Revolver’s interest isn’t, however, just about The Beatles’ instrumental creativity taking on a new life, but also their songwriting freedom, too. A good example is the opening track, Taxman. Anchored by McCartney’s metronomic bassline (later borrowed wholesale by The Jam on Start!) it was a George Harrison song that made a dig at the-then government of Harold Wilson’s tax regime which saw the highest earners paying rates of 90%. It also set the tone of an album Giles Martin has described as “not very happy” lyrically, reflecting a band already growing wan with the adulation of Beatlemania. This continues with the wistful Eleanor Rigby, with its staccato, Hitchcockian strings painting a greying portrait of a lonely woman McCartney had encountered, drawing on the band’s growing interest in Indian culture to influence the orchestration.

Go through all 14 of Revolver’s tracks and you draw conclusions about where The Beatles were at in 1966. John Lennon’s I’m Only Sleeping is, according to Martin, “classic John” in that it expressed not the compliant, mop-topped pop star of Please Please Me, but the wry individual that became his public stock-in-trade. Equally, McCartney’s Here, There And Everywhere put down a further market of his trademark romanticism. The same can be said for Yellow Submarine, a Ringo Starr song born from a Lennon idea, and would go on to become the standard bearer for opinions of The Beatles that they were simply purveyors of ‘children’s music’. Be that as it may (and no long car journey in my childhood was complete without a sing-song of it) it’s a remarkable song for a pop act fast becoming a rock band to have committed to record. I can’t imagine David Bowie - another considered an originator of progressive rock - would have considered doing The Laughing Gnome if it wasn’t for the novelty of The Beatles getting away with Yellow Submarine.

Revolver isn’t so much of an invention that it’s without outside influences. Some, like The Kinks and The Who, closer to home, while others, like The Byrds, from further afield. Martin says that Lennon was a huge fan of the latter’s Roger McGuinn and his signature Rickenbacker guitar sound, to the extent that early demos of And Your Bird Can Sing were “almost too Byrdsy”. On the feelgood Good Day Sunshine and Got To Get You Into My Life, McCartney drew on more soulful influences, with Motown in particular making its mark.

But the track that stands out more than any other for its sheer singularity is the aforementioned Tomorrow Never Knows. “What’s extraordinary about this track is it’s the first thing they did for Revolver,” Martin recently told the NME, revealing that when they started recording the album, they’d just returned from their first holiday with a load of ideas. Paul, in particular, felt that they were becoming individuals. Discovering cannabis and other recreational diversions had helped. Lennon come into the studio saying “I’ve written this song, it’s just one chord, and I want it to sound like I’m in the Himalayas singing from a mountaintop”. Martin says that for his father, the somewhat urbane and straight-laced George, to go “alright, let’s go and do that” was “amazing”.

If Revolver has remained a landmark for the last 56 years, the expectation is that Martin’s work on it today will add dimensions not even imaginable with 1960s recording technology. That certainly seems to be the result of his new mixes. “People forget that it’s just a young band playing in the studio,” Martin recently told The Times. ”Everything is fairly aggressive. Everything is in your face. Everything The Beatles recorded is a little bit louder than you think it is.” 

There is, inevitably, a cabal of fans who regard Martin’s remixes to be acts of heresy, even undoing the groundbreaking his father did as ‘the fifth Beatle’ in the studio. “I kind of embrace them because, in a way, they’re absolutely right,” Martin said to The Times. But he also says that no one is compelling anyone to listen to the new mixes. But there is room for them. I personally enjoyed the revision of the Let It Be, which had originally been over-embellished by Phil Spector, when it was reissued as Let It Be Naked - stripped back and sounding more like a rock album should do as the 60s gave way to the 70s.

Martin says his work is, essentially, a form of time travel. You can argue whether it is needed. Some will be happy with their original copy of the album from 1966. But you don’t have to be a scholar of music to enjoy the experience of hearing one of the breakthrough albums of the rock and pop era though ‘new ears’, even if you need a healthy bank balance to afford it. It may even help conclude the debate on which Beatles album was their best. Because it probably is. 

Getting back to when they really were Fab

At risk of appearing late to the party, I’ve finally found the time to consume all eight hours or so of Peter Jackson’s sumptuous Beatlesfest, Get Back. You’ve surely heard about it by now: the first part appeared on Disney+ last Thursday, with parts 2 and 3 released progressively over subsequent days, and given its collective length it’s been quite a challenge to find so much time to indulge it. 

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m not trying to confect an image of a busy urban sophisticate with little room for frivolities like a mammoth documentary about a pop band, but you find anyone with so many spare hours with which to sit exhaustively through as much 52-year-old footage of musicians sitting around smoking and strumming. 

That last statement, however, fundamentally misses the point of Jackson’s incredible project. It also brushes aside the justifiable deification of the four musicians themselves, but I’ll get to that later. Because Get Back transcends any experience or expectation you may have of a music documentary. It is more than a biopic, more than a concert film, more than a retrospective. It is, perhaps inadvertently, a near-forensic examination of a band, but conducted through the narrowest of apertures - just 29 days in January 1969. 

To this end, it is no more than a blood sample drawn over the course of one month in the entire lifetime of The Beatles, so it shouldn’t be construed as an attempt to tell their story in its entirety. It's like carbon dating an oak tree by a tiny sample of one of its rings. But in capturing even a brief window of time in The Beatles' history, Get Back depicts the state of a band that would, officially, split up just 15 months after Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot the original footage, 56 hours of which have been distilled by Jackson down to the eight.

From one angle, it depicts the mundanity of life in a band (there are plenty of shots of Ringo Starr watching on while John Lennon and Paul McCartney finesse a new song, reflecting the famous Charlie Watts quote about life as the Rolling Stones’ drummer comprising of five years’ work and 20 years spent hanging around). From another angle, Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras capture the dynamics between the quartet. There is the still-symbiotic relationship between Lennon and McCartney, with one scene depicting them discussing leadership of the group, the seemingly unspoken hierarchy that relegated the younger George Harrison to a lesser writing role, and the older Starr to, at times, merely making up the numbers (which isn't true, but there goes another well established Beatle trope).

In this mix we see Yoko Ono, rarely not at Lennon’s side, and studio visits from Linda (Eastman, as was) and a delightful cameo from her daughter Heather. Maureen Starkey and Pattie Boyd, then wives of Ringo and George, also make appearances. They provide, somewhat, glimpses of normality, of domestic maturity in stark contrast to the screaming adulation that met the formerly fresh-faced Mop Tops with their cherubic smiles, bum freezer suits and polite bowing after each number. Now, they’d become shaggy-haired men in the second half of their 20s (Lennon was 29 at the time), with kids and a collective business interest, Just seven years separate these two images.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In case you’ve missed the memo, or have been self-isolating to hermit-level media avoidance, the premise of Get Back is that it depicts the band supposedly writing, rehearsing and recording what was meant to be their eleventh studio album, while - perhaps not explicitly - opening themselves up to the possibility of live performance again. It opens on 2 January 1969 with the band assembling at Twickenham Film Studios where, on a chilly, cavernous 7,500 square-foot sound stage (the same space where they had earlier made Help! and A Hard Day’s Night) they sit in a semi-circle and attempt composition in a ‘live‘ setting. But the atmosphere appears febrile, not helped by the cold of the studio, with Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras and microphones picking up every comment, every sideways glance, with unrestricted access.

To some extent, the exercise was envisaged as a tentative return to the live performances they’d given up at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966. That had left them jaded, but the net result was that concentrating on work as a studio band alone focused The Beatles on what is now considered their most creative, free-wheeling phase, which led to the critical high of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the childishly enjoyable Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, their retreat to India, the supposed ‘grown-up’ step of forming Apple Corps, and then the eclectic brilliance of The Beatles, better known as ‘the White Album’.

As Get Back captures, Twickenham proved to be unfulfilling, even if there is oodles of output (and embryonic snippets of songs that would eventually find their way into solo repertoires, such such as Lennon’s Jealous Guy and Harrison’s All Things Must Pass). However, Twickenham established the principle of returning to a more stripped-back rock sound, with a simpler set-up in the film studio - Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sat in a semi-circle, Starr completing the arrangement, with guitars plugged into amps. No embellishments. But, as transpires, there’s an uneasy vibe, which culminates in Harrison standing up and declaring “I’m leaving the band,” and walking out muttering “I’ll see you in the clubs.”. The remaining Beatles respond by going for lunch. “We may as well get in Clapton,” jokes Lennon uneasily as they return to work, unwittingly and ironically referencing the-then hottest British guitarist who would eventually fall in love with, and marry, Harrison’s wife Boyd. 

Productivity shifts up a gear when they leave south-west London and reconvene in Mayfair, in the basement studio of 3 Savile Row, their ‘corporate’ headquarters. Harrison returns (Savile Row was his condition for doing so, along with the inspired addition of augmenting their sound with keyboard player Billy Preston, who not only relieves any residual internecine tension, but adds soul to the music, giving it a looser feel).

That, then, is ultimately what Get Back is about: the music. Before our very eyes, we get a unique insight into the gestation of what would much later become the Let It Be album. We see and hear McCartney inadvertently strum the opening chords to the song Get Back on his iconic Hofner Violin bass, and he and Paul spar gently over various attempts to arrive at the line “Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner…”. But what’s even more remarkable is that we are ultimately watching something of a failure. Even after the work at Savile Row had ended, the album ended up on the back burner, and here might lie the source of the popular belief that it was a process beset by acrimony.

Much myth and falsehood has been generated about The Beatles’ demise. Even now, Fabologists debate the sequence of events and who said what to whom during the denouement. There is, though, little-to-no traces of true discord in Get Back. If anything, it depicts the dull normality of life in a band making records. No wild and crazy drug and booze-fuelled sessions - just endless cigarettes, and copious trays of tea and toast. Band members turn up for work in the morning, break for lunch, go home in the evening. They chat, they joke, they play endless arrangements of their songs, adopting Goon-like funny voices (Peter Sellers makes an awkward appearance in the Twickenham scenes) and lark about with much the same banter you find in any office. There are tedious repeat attempts at playing songs, with arrangements being tweaked and phrasing adjusted, interspersed with impromptu jams of rock’n’roll standards like Twenty Flight Rock and the ribald Liverpudlian folk song Maggie Mae. Even when looks are cast at each other, the body language suggests nothing more sinister than the mild irritation of disagreeing with a colleague over how a PowerPoint presentation might be structured.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In fact, amid the clouds of cigarette smoke, the Fabs looked like they were having fun. Towards the end we see the infamous rooftop concert, staged at 3 Savile Row in lieu of an earlier plan to perform the new songs at an open -air show on Primrose Hill. The performance is, notoriously, interrupted by fun-free PCs Ray Dagg and Ray Shayler (other christian names were available in the 1960s to Met officers…) from West End Central nick to shut down what a couple of local numptys had branded a breach of the peace. It marks the end of The Beatles as a performing entity, but you can see in that footage of them, carefree and taking them back to Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller and Liverpool’s Cavern almost a decade before.

If there were cracks, Get Back doesn’t really depict them. But something was up. Glyn Johns was given the task of assembling the album from the combined Twickenham/Savile Row sessions, but things started unravelling. The album was abandoned (although the single Get Back was released in April 1969). Four weeks after the rooftop concert the band reconvened at Abbey Road, to make the record that would take that studio’s name. In the orthodox chronology, Abbey Road became the final album to be recorded by The Beatles, but the product of their work in January 1969 would eventually be released in May 1970, nominally one month after McCartney had declared himself out of the band. To boot, the tapes Johns had worked on had been handed over to Phil Spector to ‘re-produce’, adding elements that McCartney would eventually strip out with the Let It Be…Naked album released in 2003. Some - me especially - will maintain that it’s the better album as a result.

There is, though, probably more to The Beatles’ end story than Jackson’s epic captures. John Lennon, for example, had brought in the New York businessmen Allen Klein to manage the band’s affairs, against McCartney’s knowledge. Klein gets no attention in Get Back, which leads to some suspicion of Apple Corps’ creative control over the project. Then again, Get Back is not about the break-up of The Beatles. either. Ultimately, it’s a snapshot (albeit a gargantuan one) of 29 days in January 1966 when the Fabs got together and produced music of a richness and longevity that can be enjoyed almost as new today. We get to appreciate, through raw, unedited scenes, unencumbered by voiceovers or cutaway interviews, just what John, Paul, George and Ringo brought individually to the band, arguably dispelling some of the convenient, cartoon-like tropes that we’ve conditioned into accepting down the years. That Lennon was the caustic rocker, that McCartney was the benign, anointed one, that Harrison was the ‘Quiet One’ with the uncanny gift for song, and that Starr was that drummer’s cliche, the class clown who sat at the back and didn’t get involved. 

Get Back shows them all in a much more engaging light: Lennon was cool and surprisingly warmer than we’d expected (his interaction with the young Heather McCartney is delightful, as is Ringo’s). McCartney was and is blessed with a unique ear for melody that comes out with The Long And Winding Road and his improvised Get Back riff. You see how Harrison contributed far more than the few songs that made it onto the albums, but you also see a somewhat diffident soul. Starr was (and could still be) a remarkably exquisite drummer, capable of fills and improvisation equally as good as the more lauded tub thumpers of the rock era.

“We only think we know The Beatles,” director Peter Jackson recently told Uncut magazine while discussing the project. “We’ve seen A Hard Day’s Night and Help! We’ve seen them perform on stage in The Cavern [Club] and Shea Stadium. We’ve seen interviews or press conferences. When you think about it, those are all performance situations.” Get Back, he says, presents things differently. “When they don’t know they’re being filmed you are getting a 100 percent pure look at the real guys, which doesn’t really exist on film, particularly, anywhere else.”

Pictures: Twitter/@TheBeatles

Ultimately, Get Back is a masterclass in music making. The Beatles are or were musical deities, and over the 29 days Jackson has condensed into his film, even the most seasoned fan will come to appreciate their music even more. I won’t, though, leave it just there. Because the other thing about Get Back is that it shines a light on the accelerated timeline that The Beatles’ career ran on. When they walked into Twickenham Film Studios on the second day of January in 1969 it was less than seven years since Love Me Do. Seven years. Don’t know about you, but I wasn’t all that different in 2014 to how I am now. But in October 1962, The Beatles’ music, their haircuts, their suits, everything was in stark contrast to the beards, long hair and maturity of the men seen approaching their 30s in 1969. 

Paul McCartney and his daughter Mary at the London premiere of Get Back
Picture: Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Disney 

Stretch their timeline to its full extent, and just ten years, more or less, separates their formation in August 1960 and McCartney’s announcement in April 1970. Ten years in which they evolved from chirpy beat poppers into prototypical rock stars, a transition that, arguably, enveloped the most remarkable library of popular music that the genre has ever experienced.

51 years on, we’re getting to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, what a band of brothers The Beatles were. You could argue “So what?”. Five times more years have elapsed since they split up as they were together. But the influence The Beatles have still today is almost immeasurable. Some misanthropes will still dismiss them as purveyors of children’s songs, but in the grand scheme of things, their body of work remains beyond comparison with anything past, present and, probably, future. Get Back is not the key to understanding that bold statement, but over eight utterly engrossing, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck hours, it goes a long way to reinforcing it.

The Beatles: Get Back is streaming now on Disney+

Lazarus flies again

Today, on what would have been David Bowie’s 74th birthday - and two days before the fifth anniversary of his death - marks the start of a flurry of new Bowie activities that will continue well into the year. 

At some point today, the quick-fingered will be able to order a very limited edition single featuring previously unreleased cover versions of John Lennon’s Mother and Bob Dylan’s Tryin’ To Get To Heaven. The 7” single will be limited to just 8147 numbered copies - 1000 of which  on cream coloured vinyl - and will only be available to buy from this afternoon from the official Bowie store and Warner Music’s Dig! Experience of trying to buy the series of 1990s live albums being released progressively on these sites has proven frustrating as limited numbers have sold out almost as soon as they’ve been made available.

However, there is more this weekend to both celebrate The Dame’s birthday and commiserate his death. Starting today, a recording of the musical Lazarus will commence a short streaming run via Dice for three  nightly performances. The show was co-developed with Bowie just as he was fighting the cancer that eventually killed him. It ran in New York before transferring to London, where I was privileged to see it for myself, poignantly on the first anniversary of his death. 

Despite receiving mixed reviews from theatre critics, it provided a fascinating, if unusual, finale to Bowie’s life and career. The idea behind it was his, and saw the production revive the character he'd played in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. In that, Bowie was the alien Newton (essentially, the persona Bowie had cultivated in the first half of the 70s), stranded on Earth and coming to terms with modern day America. Lazarus updates the story, with Newton (played by Michael C. Hall) now living in a shabby New York apartment and longing to return to his home planet. It wasn’t lost on any in the audience - after Bowie had died - how personal the theme was, the result of the singer, playwright Enda Walsh and director Ivo van Hove, developing the storyline and selecting songs from the extensive song canon to propel the narrative. 

Much of Bowie’s death was surrounded in clearly intentional mystique, and as Lazarus's genesis made clear, he was clearly approaching the final curtain with typically considered reflection. Even his actual demise seemed choreographed, coming exactly two days after the release of the unexpected final album Blackstar. The final act of stage direction from an artist who, throughout his career, had cultivated a series of guises as vessels for his art. 

Bowie knew he was dying as Lazarus was being developed. At one point, he told van Hove that he would be stepping back from rehearsals due to illness requiring treatment. Still, though, only a tiny circle of people were aware, which meant that when Blackstar arrived, as enigmatically as 2013's The Next Day - his previous surprise album - there was hope of a renaissance in the 69-year-old’s output. 

The clues, however, were there in Blackstar: the bleak lyrics, with references to morbidity; the surreal video, featuring a beatific Bowie singing in heavenly glory; another scene, in which the corpse of an astronaut rests on a planetary surface, pointing to the final resting place of Major Tom. They all pointed to the outcome that was announced on 10 January, 2016. Perhaps, now, not so subtly, though at the time the Blackstar single was released in November 2015, no one knew what was truly to come.

Lazarus was an unusual memorial, but on the other hand, exactly what you would have expected. While it could be accused of resembling a trendy secondary school drama teacher’s personal hobby horse, it provided people like me with a chance to grieve and celebrate Bowie’s music at the same time. I’ll happily admit to having “something in my eye” at the end of it. It was, of course, no substitute for seeing Bowie perform one last time (I only got to see him live once, to my eternal regret), but Lazarus and its adoring audience felt like a fitting commune for the Starman. Long may we wallow.

On Sunday, Where Are We Now will look more extensively at Bowie's last years, and the apparent contentment he'd found during his final tour.

Imagine Lennon at 80

Picture: Iain Macmillan/Yoko Ono

Today would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday, which would have been a curious prospect at the best of times. The thought of him today, in the age of Trump, coronavirus, Twitter and any one of the myriad cultural earthquakes since his murder on 9th December, 1980, is somewhat mouth-watering to consider, and mind-boggling at the same time.

The most startling reality, however, is that it is indeed almost 40 years since Lennon was taken from us, three months after his 40th birthday, by psychotic fan Mark David Chapman who shot the Beatle four times in the back, outside his Dakota Building apartment in New York. Plenty of our greatest rock and pop icons have been taken too soon - no need here to reel off membership of The 27 Club - but with no disrespect to, say Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix - Lennon was out there in an echelon of his own. Being one of The Beatles, alone, made him a deity: even if you disregard his arguably patchy post-Fab solo career, the body of work Lennon contributed to in just the briefest window of time that he, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were a creative entity transcends almost any other recording act I can think of. A grand statement, I know, but sometimes consideration of their contribution to music history is so awe-inspiring that it can make your head spin. That's not to say that anyone else isn't good. It's just that very little comes close, whatever your viewpoint or degree of objectivity.

The tragedy, here, is that in terms of time, Lennon would only live a further ten years after the breakup of The Beatles. Ten years. Some artists go that long without releasing anything. He would, though, like all three of his former bandmates, continue to be productive, producing the albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, Some Time In New York City, Mind Games, Walls And Bridges, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Double Fantasy (the posthumous Milk And Honey was released in 1984). Each contained no shortage of memorable (if slightly derivative) songs like Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) and the perennial festive hit Happy Xmas (War Is Over). These can all be reassessed today with the release of Gimme Some Truth, a sumptuous, reissued greatest hits selection which now contains multichannel, high-definition remixes of Lennon's best solo work, from Jealous Guy to the withering, McCartney-targeted How Do You Sleep?, as well as rockers like Whatever Gets You Thru The Night (featuring Elton John) and one of my all-time favourite Lennon solo pieces, Watching The Wheels.

The conventional wisdom, such is the perennial journalistic need for competitive comparison, is that the post-Beatles creative spoils were shared by McCartney and Harrison (let's leave poor old Ringo alone), and that even as a foursome, the sum of the parts was never greater than the whole. But that belies the truth that revolutions generally only happen once. The legacy of that whole is immeasurable, given how much of music since 1970 still owes a debt of gratitude to what the Fabs delivered in the eight years between Please Please Me and Let It Be. Lennon's own legacy becomes, often, complicated by his personality, his passions, his interests. And that makes contemplating how he would have spent the last 40 years such a head-shrinkingly impossible task.

One thing is for certain, and that is that he wouldn't have been able to escape his former band. Just as McCartney and Starr, today, and Harrison until his death in 2001, can't (or shouldn't) escape the its shadow, it would have been interesting to think of how Lennon would have dealt with The Beatles never-ending tail. The wide hypothesis is that a reunion, of sorts, would have taken place, perhaps at Live Aid, though this is not a forgone conclusion. Led Zeppelin have had vast sums of money dangled before them to reform, but Robert Plant, mainly, has not given in. Likewise Pink Floyd - with Roger Waters - reformed for Live 8, but with Richard Wright's demise, and little signs of Waters and David Gilmour's frosty relations warming up, that ship has probably sailed. McCartney and Starr have reunited regularly, usually at all-star charity events, but it's not quite the same. Not that McCartney hasn't sat still, creatively, which makes you wonder what it would have been like for him and Lennon to have returned to writing together, even as they reached their respective dotages.

By the time Lennon was giving his final interviews in 1980, seemingly more contented with life, living with Yoko in New York, there appeared to be a mellowing. While traces of his acerbic, sometimes cruel wit remained, you could imagine an eventual reparation in his relationship with McCartney. He is, though, unlikely to have eased up on the social injustices that fired him so. Even at 80, he would have a point of view about the environment and Black Lives Matter. He would have opposed both Gulf Wars. He would still be maintaining that we should give peace a chance. It would have been fascinating to hear his thoughts on the death of his great friend and fellow-adopted New Yorker, David Bowie. Conceivably they would have worked together several times beyond their collaboration on Bowie's Young Americans album and the hit Fame in particular. The pair first met at a party in Los Angeles in 1974, and hit it off. Bowie revealed in 1995 that he thought they'd be "buddies forever", drawn to a similar sense of humour as much as anything else, though strangely they had differing views on each other's work ("I asked [John] what he thought of what I was doing, glam rock, and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s great, but it’s just rock and roll with lipstick on’.").

Lennon was, in Bowie's view, "probably one of the brightest, quickest-witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life," qualifying the statement with: “Socialist in its true definition, not in fabricated political sense, a real humanist." In the same interview, Bowie - of all people - nailed what it was that kept the Beatles' legacy in universal consciousness. "They gave the British the illusion we meant something again and we love hearing that, boy do we love hearing that.”

Like Bowie, it's probable that Lennon's career would have dipped in the 1980s and early 1990s. Even with the patronage of upstarts like Liam Gallagher, with his allusions of being Lennon himself (even naming his son by Patsy Kensit after the Beatle), the creative fires within are unlikely to have dimmed. Contemporaries, like Paul Simon, for example, have continued to produce intelligent while hardly radical music long into their 70s. McCartney himself is still making albums which, but comparison with younger, lesser acolytes, are still on their game. The flames of anger, too, would continue to flicker, just as Roger Waters continues to rail at pet causes.

The most obvious touchstone here are the Rolling Stones. In the 60s it was a binary choice between them and their Fab rivals (which, like most battles in pop was entirely confected, and they were all, actually, good friends). But whereas The Beatles came to a halt, the Stones have rolled on, doing their thing and doing it well. They still hold the title "Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band In The World" with aplomb, and with little sign of relinquishing it, even as their eighth decades on this planet beckon.

And that's a good place to leave this. John Winston Ono Lennon was, from the outset, a rock and roller: "I only liked simple rock and nothing else," he told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in an interview published in his book Lennon Remembers. Rock and roll - even at its most essential, with Little Richard screaming "a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!" - was, for Lennon, a vessel that got directly to the point.  It's quite possible, that at 80, he'd be still getting directly to the point on many things.

Definitely not Ed Sheeran: Liam Gallagher's As You Were

Let's establish the facts, as they stand: Oasis were good, Noel Gallagher's post-Oasis output has been good, Liam Gallagher's post-Oasis output less good/awful/should stick to selling menswear, and that the chances of an Oasis reunion are of a cold-day-in-Hell magnitude, based on Gallagher Junior's near-daily tirade of Twitter jibes about Gallagher Senior.

In spite of the often vituperative and mostly inventive barbs aimed at his brother, Liam has cut a relatively more avuncular figure in recent months, launching a charm offensive in preparation for today's release of his debut solo album, As You Were. This, arguably, began last year with an interview with Q magazine's Ted Kessler - conducted mostly in a north London pub over two August days - which I will put before the court as being one of the funniest, most engaging and open interviews I've read with a rock star, let alone one renown for being profane, playground bully-thuggish and generally hostile. Of the interview's many revelations, it was the fact that the previously Olympic-level caner was now getting up at 5am each morning to go for runs on Hampstead Heath and while not exactly now a paragon of lactose-free milk-drinking clean living, was - as he was entering his 44th year - a different character. Contemplative, even.

With both of his previous bands declared dead, and the odds of a fraternal Gallagher reconciliation zero, Gallagher revealed to Kessler that he'd picked up a guitar and was engaging in songwriting. To the uninitiated, this may have come as either a surprise or a worry. After all, wasn't Noel responsible for writing all of Oasis' songs, or at least the good ones? Well, no. Both Beady Eye albums - while not good - gave Liam the opportunity to develop his writing chops. And if you wanted an example of how good his writing could be, just listen to the final Oasis album, Dig Out Your Soul, and the Liam-written track I'm Outta Time, a track his brother branded "deceptively brilliant". I branded it a Bond-theme-in-waiting, and certainly better than Jack White and Alicia Keys' execrable Another Way To Die released the same year for Quantum Of Solace.

In the Q interview, however, Gallagher seemed reluctant to brand the new songs he'd been writing as the launch of a new direction. "I am not embarking on a solo 'career'. Everyone should know that," he told Kessler. "There are just 10, 11 songs I've written that are eligible to be recorded. They've got flair, attitude, the melodies are sick and the words are fucking funny. We'll record them this year and release it next year. It'll shock people. It's a record written by me, that's got all the right ingredients and sounds well tasty."

And it is. Very much so. OK, much of it is in the Oasis vein - a lot of guitar-based swagger topped by Gallagher's Lennonesque nasal vocal - but rather than simply being derivative, As You Were is a glorious continuation of what that outfit did best. Ask most people what they would like out of most of their favourite bands and they'll say "more of the same, please". It should be pointed out that the album isn't entirely Gallagher's own work: American producer and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurtin is amongst a number of collaborators keeping As You Were on solid ground (and he brings to the party experience of working with Adele, Foo Fighters and others). But this assistance comes in terms of flourish. Thus, a track like Paper Crown (in which Gallagher sounds more like Cast's John Power) stands out, not only for its melodic strength but also for its open sound, something the tremendous single Wall Of Glass also benefits from, with its soulful, funky treatment. Likewise, Chinatown, with its Feeling Groovy guitar motif, finds Gallagher losening his trademark snarl, and delivering a dreamy, psychedelic wooze-out that stands apart from anything he's produced before, both melodically as well as in terms of his songwriting maturity.

As I'm Outta Time proved, Liam has a knack for the grandiose, stadium-swelling ballad. It's a gift that, if he was feeling generous, Noel would recognise he shares with his younger sibling. For What It's Worth fits this capability. Yes, you could probably sing All Around The World over it, but then such mashups were possible with much of the Oasis canon. Really, it doesn't matter, when the songs are this pleasing and this singalongable. I've already made one Beatles reference and it is, inevitably, impossible not to find another: When I'm In Need has Beatley choral elements, but is also slap-bang in the midst of what pop music should always be - big, bold and attitudinal, with the sort of melodic hook that won't leave you alone. What Oasis did to perfection.

I'm not surprised that As You Were is good, but I was surprised that across its 12 tracks it delivers consistently and delivers well. Whatever your view of Liam - git, enfant terrible, etc, etc - he has produced one of the stand-out entertaining albums of the year. Yes, with his brother's next album coming out next month we can expect more of the Gallagher rough-and-tumble; but with Noel also writing some of the best British pop-rock of our time, rather than wishing, pitifully, for an Oasis reunion, we should revel in the fact that we have two members of the same family capable of producing huge, epic records that stand the test of repeat listening, and which translate effortlessly to memorable live performance. For anyone despairing about the inexplicable dominance of Ed Sheeran on the charts, with his bland, indistinguishable autopop, it is genuinely heartwarming that someone is capable of producing a rock-based record of such enjoyability as Liam Gallagher has done with As You Were.

Augmenting reality - Beatie Wolfe's Raw Space

There was a time, in my deep, dark and ever-so-slightly dank past when I regularly attended the launch of a new album. Over on-trend bottled beers and record company vol-au-vents, scribes would be entertained by the artist or artists in question, followed by an opportunity to mix and mingle, invariably accompanied by a ferocious record company press officer doing their level best to prevent any awkward questions (you know, about drug busts, tour "larks" and inter-band creative differences).

So today I enjoyed a somewhat circular return to this world with my 'attendance' of an album launch with a difference - a very big difference, in fact - which could easily be described as truly post-modern. Beatie Wolfe, the London-born singer-songwriter who, with her first two albums built a very credible reputation for both her melodic dexterity and use of digital art in combination, today launched her record Raw Space with an event that combined a novel convergence of digital and physical music with an augmented reality experience.

Wolfe and Nokia Bell Labs, the storied research institution now owned by my Finnish employer, hosted a vinyl playback of the album from an anechoic chamber (essentially a sound-absorbing room), combined with 360-degree augmented reality content and streamed over YouTube. Now, if this sounds like just a promotional gimmick (and in my day I experienced some intensely wacky stunts...) there was technological merit to the exercise: Wolfe says that she wanted to challenge the current streaming experience, which audiophiles, particularly, will concur might be convenient but from a listening point of view, quite flat. Noting that streamed music is "somewhat compressed both sonically and creatively", Wolfe wanted to celebrate the album form - "its artwork, arc, narrative, music", the things that still count for those of us queuing at dawn the other Saturday to get our grubbies on Record Store Day releases.

Picture: Beatie Wolfe/Instagram

It's not the first time Bell Labs has collaborated with the art world - over the 50 years of its E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) initiative it has worked with the likes of John Cage and Andy Warhol. Today's Bell Labs president, Marcus Weldon, says this latest meeting of music and science is particularly novel. "This collaboration with Beatie looks at the intersection of art and tech in a truly inspired way," he says. "I couldn't think of a better project or artistic collaborator to champion the next phase of this defining exploration of the human possibilities of technology."

It's fair to say that musicians have enjoyed a mixed relationship with technology. There has been, of course, the tacit acceptance of commercial streaming services as distribution platforms, even if the vast majority would still prefer you to buy their albums in a physical form. My friend Steven Wilson famously drove a car repeatedly over an MP3 player in his Insurgentes documentary, part in protest at the sound quality of compressed music and part in protest over the download culture killing off the art of the long-form album. Peter Gabriel - a pioneer of studio innovations and whose father was an inventor and engineer - has warmly embraced digital audio with a considerable emphasis on promoting higher sound quality formats like lossless compression, while at the same time re-releasing his albums on audiophile-grade half-speed vinyl. And, yes, you can hear the difference.

In Wolfe's case, it's been about melding music, technology and art, something she's been doing from the very beginning of her recording career. Her 2013 debut Eight was the first album released as a hologram (it required an iPhone and a projection accessory to play it), while its 2015 follow-up Montagu Square (respectfully named after the onetime abode of John and Yoko where it was recorded) was made available on NFC-enabled business cards. That, Wolfe explained to Wired magazine, was "a synthesis of music and history", something you could say today's event -given its marriage of the resurgent vinyl album with the emerging canvass of virtual and augmented reality - was a vigorous example of.

As for the album itself, Raw Space embraces all of the ingredients I enjoy in the current generation of guitar-based singer-songwriters, in particular The Magic Numbers' Michele Stodart: a strong influence of Americana, brooding without being morose, romantic without being soppy, upbeat without being over-poppy. Songs range from the refined West Village coffee shop soul-bearing of The Man Who and the deliciously drawling Pure Being, to the countrified warmth of Gimme Some Love and the rootsy vibe of Broken Bird. For a big, ballsy rocker like Oh Darling there is the contrasting intimacy of As You, while the piano-and-strings ballad How Can I brings out the rich timbre of Wolfe's voice, as well as the pleasing balance of her writing - neither overwrought or underwrought.

There is a pleasing resonance to Raw Space but not so familiar as to be predictable. Far from it. It's launch, however, opened up a very different realm, one which I'm pretty certain we haven't heard the last of. Just when you think you've seen it all, someone like Beatie Wolfe comes along at opens up a completely new dimension. More power to her.

Future legend: David Bowie's Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976)

As I would hope is well recognised, few bend at the knee more to the greatness of David Bowie than I. But there are some limits: the eye-watering Eur 266.99 being asked at my local record emporium for Where Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), the admittedly sumptuous second box set released today and covering The Dame's pre-Berlin, mid-Seventies career, which produced the studio albums Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and Station To Station.

To be fair, that Eur 266 does buy you 13 180g audiophile-quality vinyl discs, including these three albums plus The Gouster - the previously unreleased album that became Young Americans, TWO versions of the double album David Live (the 2005 reissue runs to three-discs) and the double Live Nassau Coliseum '76, plus another collection of rarities, Re:Call 2. For the digitally-minded (and those with smaller budgets) the collection is also available as a 12-CD package at a more modest Eur 129.99. Still, an expensive fortnight, following the release last week of Led Zeppelin's Complete BBC Sessions.

Of course, we're appealing to the über consumer here. Most self-respecting Bowie fans - and even those with only a casual interest - will have the three studio albums already. But, inevitably, interest in The Dame has piqued with his death, and if that brings new appreciation for his canon via these luxury re-releases, so much the better.

What makes this particular box set interesting is where Bowie was in this period. It began with his move, first to New York and then Los Angeles, to make America his base of operations. This, as Paul Tryka detailed in his excellent Starman biography, saw Bowie consumed by compulsive behaviour, including wild spending, Olympic cocaine consumption and numerous obsessions with people (Mick Jagger) and themes (post-apocalyptic dystopia). Diamond Dogs was the first manifestation of the latter: his eighth album, it was built on a fascination with George Orwell's 1984 and the bleak vision of the (then) future it depicted. 

Diamond Dogs also appeared after Bowie had theatrically 'retired' the Ziggy Stardust character, but in doing so he merely moved on to a new guise, the whey-faced Thin White Duke, eschewing the glam rock that Bowie had pursued in the previous two years. Though recorded at London's Olympic Studios (as well as some work at Ludolph Studios in Nederhorst den Berg, a tiny village in the rural Amsterdam hinterland...and just down the road from where I used to live), Diamond Dogs had a noticeably looser sound, pointing towards the 'Americanization' that would evolve further with Young Americans and its notable shift towards soul and funk.

For some of Bowie's earlier cheerleaders, the Diamond Dogs era marked a less welcome change. John Peel, who'd been one of the strongest champions at the outset of Bowie's career, remarked that Bowie's cover of the Eddie Floyd soul classic Knock On Wood, and released as a single off David Live, was "lazy, arrogant and impertinent". But it was on the tour that produced David Live that Bowie appeared in one of the most fascinating - and disturbing - documentaries ever made about a rock musician: Alan Yentob's Cracked Actor. 

Made for the BBC's Omnibus arts magazine, Yentob captured an emaciated Bowie, deep in the grip of cocaine addition, on tour in California, with semi-lucid interviews in the back of limousines interspersed with footage of Bowie performing the Diamond Dogs title track along with earlier entries from the canon like Space Oddity, Aladdin Sane and John, I'm Only Dancing (Again). Sadly, Cracked Actor has never been released on home media, although some dodgy bootlegs - recorded off the last BBC screening - lurk online. See it if you can, but be prepared to see a Bowie in a very different space to the jovial, blokey star of chat shows in the late 1990s.

Who Can I Be Now? could very easily have been called something like 'The American Years'. His desire to explore contemporary American music stretches back to the demise of Ziggy Stardust, when the singer was already looking for a new vehicle. Who Can I Be Now? is one of the tracks on The Gouster, the album that Bowie worked on immediately after the Dogs tour, and is a title reflecting his need to reinvent himself. The album took him to Philadelphia's Sigma Sound studio to immerse in the local music culture with producer Tony Visconti, with whom he had reunited to work with on the David Live release. Though The Gouster was never released, it contained early versions of Right, Can You Hear Me and Somebody Up There Likes Me, along with a reworking of John, I'm Only Dancing (Again) and an early version of Young Americans.

It would be a stretch to say that The Gouster alone warrants buying the Who Can I Be Now? package, but for Bowie completists it marks a curious bridging point between Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. It was, according to Visconti, an attempt at soul - "plastic soul", as Bowie would later waspishly brand it - and even its title (a reference to African-American fashion in the 1960s) was meant to represent a statement of attitude. 

It's eventual release is more, though, than a work in progress, but the reason why it didn't appear in its originally recorded form was partly down to Bowie recording too many longer songs to fit a single album, and also to the capricious state Bowie was in at the time. Some of the songs recorded for The Gouster were taken into a New York studio with John Lennon, who gave the prototypes outright Philly soul sound (which included guitar work from Carlos Alomar and then-unknown singer Luther Vandross) more of a pop feel. But given how much we still don't know about Bowie, even the presence of a few previously unreleased tracks interpolates gaps in the fan's understanding of the musical - and physical - state Bowie was in between 1974 and 1976.

The cocaine that Bowie was hoovering up at this point in his life may have affected his increasingly paranoid personality, but not necessarily his creativity. After Young Americans came Station To Station. Lasting only six tracks and running for just under 38 minutes, it is both a demonstration of  Bowie's impatience to release new material, but also the inventiveness with which he was still streets ahead of any of his peers at the time. Golden Years still sounds, 40 years later, box-fresh, while TVC 15 stands out for its funk and pace, and remains one of my favourite Bowie songs of all time. And his cover of Nina Simone's Wild Is The Wind became so distinct it's now hard to think of how Simone recorded it to begin with (a live version on the Bowie At The Beeb limited edition three-CD set in 2000 saw Bowie - accompanied by his brilliant band of the time - teetering between torch song and rock epic).

Thematically, Station To Station found Bowie toying obsessively with yet new literary inspiration, namely the works of Aleister Crowley and Friedrich Nietzsche, and reflects a state of mind in some degree of turmoil. It's hard not to wonder how much of that was the result of the cocaine. But the album - which precedes the Berlin trilogy and its starker sound and vision (sorry...) - also evolves the funk that had been the hallmark of Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. Ever the magpie, Bowie had become interested in German industrial rock and the synths and rhythms of Kraftwerk, the influence of which can be heard in spirit on Station To Station. However, even Bowie admitted that the album was also a statement of detachment. 

Towards the end of the album's tour (from which the Live Nassau Coliseum 76 release was culled), Bowie arrived at London's Victoria Station in an open-topped Mercedes and was photographed giving what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Having previously been questioned by police for possession of Nazi memorabilia as well as being quoted saying that the UK "...could benefit from a Fascist leader", many felt that, along with his somewhat stark, black and white stage aesthetic, Bowie was indeed leaning to the extreme right. Not long after, a drunk Eric Clapton gave his support to Enoch Powell's notorious comments on immigration, leading to the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement. The popular perception became that Britain's rock elite were not as cool as their fans had expected them to be.

Bowie would later dismiss the Victoria Station episode as a case of a photographer catching him at an unfortunate angle. Others would simply put it all down to a rock star's descent into cocaine-induced mania (and portrayed, inadvertently, by Bob Geldof's 'Pink' in Alan Parker's film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall). No wonder, then, that Bowie's next move would be to decamp with Iggy Pop to Berlin - then Europe's drug gateway - though to sober up, both chemically but also creatively.

It's hard, then, not to view the music contained on the numerous discs of Who Can I Be Now? as the result of a rock star in stereotypical drug-addled exploration. But whereas the mountains of coke being taken by the rock music community in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s led to some of music's blandest output, the reason why Bowie continues to be deservedly exalted is loud and clear in this collection. Whatever his state, whatever his application of outside influences, he was, between '74 and '76, still the most unique performer in rock and roll, then or since.

A little touch of Wilco - Schmilco

It's perhaps ironic that the band once tagged 'the American Radiohead' should have pulled off something of a Radiohead with this, their tenth album. Not that Wilco have gone all Kid A on us with Schmilco, but in producing a record as muted and apparently reticent, they've (presumably) inadvertently mirrored the similarly understated mood of their supposed British counterparts' swoonfully good Moon Shaped Pool from earlier this year.

For some, these things are a big deal. Jeff Tweedy and friends' breakthrough in the mid-90s, a period culminating in the landmark Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, pitched Wilco as an eclectic alt-rock band, pointing in interesting directions ranging from The Beatles to the American New Wave. Last year's streamed album Star Wars returned to these contrarian origins, but Schmilco, recorded in the same sessions, ploughs a more conventional furrow, rarely straying from the softly-strummed and contemplative. Not that there is anything bad about that.

Indeed, Schmilco comes across as the intentional comedown after Star Wars, and none more so than the backdoor jam of Normal American Kids, which sets the tone for the 12-track collection with Tweedy's mockingly self-resentful quips about simply not fitting in. Continuing the theme of childhood acceptance, If I Ever Was A Child romps briskly through its two minutes and 56 seconds with a countrified jaunt that has overtones of the legendary Harry Nilsson, whose album titles Schmilco doffs its cap to. The pace picks up further with Cry All Day, threatening to get rockier still, but maintaining restraint, despite seemingly releasing pent-up irritation at someone with lines like "I'm sick of your affliction, but you're just a smart ass and blind".

If Wilco have endured comparisons over the years with The Beatles, they should have no complaint about this coming up again with Nope. Their case isn't helped by the uncanny similarity between Tweedy's voice and John Lennon's, and the sort of scratchy blues the Fabs' regularly explored in their latter years. And, at a pinch, you can hear traces of Come Together, and again, I'm not complaining - far from it. Someone to Lose, with its wiggy guitars and laid-back rock, has similar Beatley moments, as does the wry Happiness, with the slap-back treatment of vocals and drums bringing Tweedy closer to Lennon than ever. It might sound lazy to make such a comparison, but given how much we've been deprived by both the Beatles' truncated career as a band, and Lennon's tragically truncated life, it's actually a joy to have a band as subtly inventive as Wilco pick up the baton.

The tracks are mostly short and sweet - Quarters is mostly instrumental - as if the result of improvised jams. With some bands that might leave the impression that the album is a collection of unfinished songs, but most carry a sense of delivery and completion, Locator the one exception, with its slightly unfulfilled fade out.

It's understandable, then, how some reviewers have regarded Schmilco as an interim entry in the Wilco canon (a "minor addition", wrote London's Evening Standard). But even if this 36-minute collection is a relative novella in the overall Wilco library, it's as satisfying, as warm and as complete as any in the ten albums they've released.

Tomorrow never knew - The Beatles' Revolver turns 50

2016 will go down as the year that began with the death of a rock icon whom people actually believed held the universe together, and that the subsequent procession of celebrity departures, along with enormous political upheavals, has been down to his untimely demise. Those with their heads less buried in the clouds will just put this down to unfortunate circumstance. However, with 2016 being exactly 50 years on from 1966, there is an ornate sense of the circular going on, that somehow we're completing a cycle.

Because '66 was the year which, culturally, launched everything. And it was all thanks to four records: Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Blues Breakers with John Mayall and Eric Clapton, and The Beatles' Revolver.

Five decades on, this quartet - released within three months of each other - remain landmarks in the evolution of popular music: Dylan's for the dexterity of its writing, Blues Breakers for introducing the overdriven, amplified guitar that would shape rock music forever (see my post Breaking blues - the buddhas of suburbia from a couple of weeks ago), and Pet Sounds and Revolver - often seen as direct rivals - for taking pop music, pop music composition, pop music recording techniques and the manifestation of conceptual thinking in pop music to a totally different level.

The Beatles were in total awe of The Beach Boys, but Brian Wilson's masterpiece, released in May 1966, was itself something of a response to their own Rubber Soul, released the year before. While their next album wouldn't be an intentional tit-for-tat response, it was clear that with Revolver - along with Blonde On Blonde and Pet Sounds - mainstream pop was emerging into something else. The Elvis-inspired, stage-driven rock and roll that had breathed life into pop and which fuelled The Beatles at the Cavern and on the Reeperbahn had served its purpose. It was now about storytelling, about songcraft and expanding what was possible, and in The Beatles' case, turning the studio into an instrument in its own right.

Revolver was released 50 years ago today and has been quite rightly feted as pop's Great Leap Forward™. But quite why requires some examination: sequentially sandwiched in the Fab canon between Rubber Soul and the even greater opus of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, John Lennon and George Harrison both saw Revolver as Part 2 of a cycle that began with Rubber Soul. Lennon, typically more colourfully, branded Rubber Soul as "the pot album", but Revolver "the acid album", a clearly tongue in cheek reference to the creative stimuli applied in both.

Revolver was, however, far from simply a trip. Emboldened by their move away from trite Merseybeat on its predecessor, Revolver evolved John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison further as songwriters. And here is where it draws its greatest gasp. Incredibly, we're only talking three years after their debut album, Please Please Me, but Revolver brought maturity, a premature world-weariness, even. McCartney was already contemplating middle age (he'd turned 24 that June) and a life of semi-retirement dressed in tweed and a cloth cap; Lennon - genuinely horrified by the reaction to his 'bigger than Jesus' quip - looked to the studio as a means of escaping the frustrations of live performance (namely the screaming teens who drowned out their music) and somewhat replaced the raw energy of gigging that he'd enjoyed in the early days with the energy of writing without limits. George Martin played an enormous role here in indulging Lennon's whims, knowing full well that Lennon was a huge fan of The Goon Show, of whom Martin had worked on comedy albums with Peter Sellers, and whichnreflected The Goons' own unparalleled "theatre of the mind" inventivenes.

14 songs was a lot for an album in the mid-60s, when bands were churning them out every nine months or so before embarking on tours. But across these songs - some of The Beatles' very best - Revolver established a new role for what a pop band could talk about. On Taxman they took swipes at Harold Wilson's Labour government (one of Harrison's three contributions which reflected his own coming-of-age as a writer), explored Catholic themes with Eleanor Rigby and gave McCartney a platform to expand his musical palette - his whimsy on Here, There And Everywhere, the intentionally childishness of Yellow Submarine ("it's a children's song," he explained at the time) and his sunny disposition (in contrast to Lennon's cynicism) with Good Day Sunshine.

Revolver was unafraid to shoot in different directions - the Motown funk of Got To Get You Into My Life (a track, believe it or not, once covered by Joe Pesci sounding a lot like Neil Sedaka...), the West Coast jangle of Dr. Robert, the anti-pop of I'm Not Sleeping, the rockiness of She Said She Said, and the experimentation with Indian spiritualism on Love You To, creating narratives and soundscapes with sound effects and double-tracking techniques of the kind that progressive rock would build upon in the decade that followed. Actually, it's no great shock to discover that Revolver and Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon were recorded in the same Abbey Road studio, albeit six years apart. Perhaps, then, much of the genetic code in the Floyd's early work, and indeed others, like David Bowie, can be found buried like a time capsule in one song on Revolver, the one that ends the album: Tomorrow Never Knows.

If Revolver as a whole marked a turning point in the trajectory of rock music, Tomorrow Never Knows is the hinge. What had begun as a droning, single-chord song called Mark 1 - strummed by Lennon on an acoustic guitar for George Martin's approval - became one of the most acclaimed album tracks in music history, for its tripiness ("Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream - it is not dying") - which was more a reflection of Lennon's interest in meditation than references to LSD - and its sonic innovation. Using barely new studio equipment, loops of various noises, tracking, compression and a host of other techniques, Tomorrow Never Knows - named after yet another one of Ringo Starr's malapropisms - took listeners into a completely new world, one that beat-obsessed pop was probably not ready for. Lines like "Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void – it is shining." and "That you may see the meaning of within – it is being" were from another universe by comparison to "I wanna hold your hand" and "She loves you - Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!". But, to make the point again, it is truly incredible to think of how far The Beatles had travelled between these two sets of lyrics, and how music was taken along with it.

Revolver is, for many Beatles fans, their favourite, though trying to judge them all is a rabbit hole worth avoiding. There will always be merits to the breadth of Pepper, of gems like Julia, Dear Prudence and While My Guitar Gently Weeps on 'the white album', of the closure of Abbey Road and the blueprint for bluesy '70s album rock that was Let It Be (especially if you hear it in its original 'naked' state.

But Revolver remains my favourite for both what it was and what it did. Today, 50 years on, I can listen back to it - as someone who grew up long after The Beatles had disbanded (I was born the year after it was released) - and identify the source code of music I have cherished ever since I became musically of age. It really is that Biblical.