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.
