100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Taxman

02 Eleanor Rigby

03 I’m Only Sleeping

04 Love You To

05 Here, There and Everywhere

06 Yellow Submarine

07 She Said She Said

08 Good Day Sunshine

09 And Your Bird Can Sing

10 For No One

11 Doctor Robert

12 I Want to Tell You

13 Got to Get You into My Life

14 Tomorrow Never Knows

Recorded in less than three months during the London spring of 1966, Revolver is the album where pop music sheds any residual limitations and stops second guessing what it may be capable of. It is a remarkably concise yet hugely diverse collection of songs from a quartet who had attained their creative peak while onlookers were still trying to judge them by their earlier work. Both individually and as a group the Beatles broke new ground with their seventh studio album, and it remains an incredibly influential set. In the weeks and months after its release, Revolver would contribute to the rise of psychedelic rock and electronic experimentation; in the years and decades since, it has become a touchstone that offers inspiration and sustenance.

The Beatles had proven to be revolutionary when they broke through in 1962, essentially creating the modern teenager with their string of hit singles and chaotic concert appearances. Instead of resting on those laurels and coasting into satiated respectability, they turned on their own framework and launched a second revolution, this time in the studio. Revolver is the album that conceives the idea of the record as creating a self-contained world; one that remakes the accepted reality by virtue of its very presence. You couldn’t hear a track like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ for the first time and simply carry on as if nothing had changed.

In ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ John Lennon observes, ‘When your prized possessions start to weigh you down/Look in my direction, I’ll be round, I’ll be round’, which sounds like a coded reference to the power of a vinyl record and a reminder of how important the studio was becoming to the Beatles. The group – guitarists Lennon and George Harrison, bassist Paul McCartney and drummer Ringo Starr – would tour briefly after they finished Revolver (although they didn’t include anything from it in their simplified live set), culminating in what was their final paid concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on 29 August 1966. But gigging was already on the way out in 1965; so was working to a record company’s expectations. There was no new Beatles album for Christmas in 1965.

Prior to beginning work on Revolver the four members of the band had enjoyed three months off – the first considerable break they’d had in years and, more importantly, their first lengthy period of time away from each other. Differences, and the egos and excess that exacerbated them, would eventually pull the Beatles apart, but in 1966 the band was becoming four different artists who were still intent on making the best record possible together; they were still greater than the sum of their individual parts.

‘We were really starting to find ourselves in the studio. We were finding what we could do, just being the four of us and playing our instruments. The overdubbing got better, even though it was always pretty tricky because of the lack of tracks. The songs got more interesting, so with that the effects got more interesting,’ Ringo Starr would later recall. ‘I think the drugs were kicking in a little more heavily on this album. I don’t think we were on anything major yet; just the old usual – the grass and the acid. I feel to this day that though we did take certain substances, we never did it to a great extent at the session. We were really hard workers. That’s another thing about The Beatles – we worked like dogs to get it right.’

According to Paul McCartney at the time, the Beatles had pondered recording in America, but they considered the studio rates quoted to them as outrageous, so they reconvened at the EMI Studios on London’s Abbey Road – where there were World War II veterans working as porters and a dress code for employees that was unequivocal about the need for a collar and tie. Their producer, George Martin, had resigned from EMI after requests for improved remuneration were flatly rejected despite the Beatles’ enormous profitability, and he was now an independent contractor. He still favoured a tie, but it was metaphorically loosened as he and 19-year-old studio engineer Geoff Emerick became co-conspirators with the musicians.

‘The group encouraged us to break the rules. It was implanted when we started Revolver that every instrument should sound unlike itself: a piano shouldn’t sound like a piano, a guitar shouldn’t sound like a guitar,’ Emerick more recently noted. ‘There were lots of things I wanted to try, we were listening to American records and they sounded so different.’

The records that were arriving in England included singles such as the Byrds’ mesmeric ‘Eight Miles High’ and Brian Wilson’s first (solo) take on the lushly poignant ‘Caroline, No’, as well as Bob Dylan’s groundbreaking Highway 61 Revisited album. Each album, in its own way, suggested that the recording studio was a place of reinvention, where the artists and their music could be remade free of constraints. For the Revolver sessions the Beatles took this idea to its zenith, looking to rewrite the rules of both how music was recorded and thus how it would be heard.

In the studio the musicians and their enablers experimented with Artificial Double Tracking – invented by an EMI engineer the month sessions began – which allowed for a vocal to be played back with a minute separation so that two vocals could be combined. It was used extensively on the album, especially by John Lennon, and the machine also allowed for recordings to be sped up or slowed down via a dedicated oscillator, which changed a sound’s texture.

Another crucial strategy was backwards recordings which, according to Emerick, became a default experiment as the band pursued the idea. On ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, a song that sounds as if it’s suspended between being awake and asleep, the conscious and the subconscious, George Harrison took the notation for his guitar solo, played the notes in reverse order and then had the tape played backwards. The result is otherworldly and uneasy, a genius intrusion into the song’s floating reverie.

‘I’m Only Sleeping’ was one of Lennon’s compositions, reportedly inspired by Paul McCartney having to wake his fellow songsmith in the afternoon for writing sessions and, like most of his pieces on the album, it is insular and arrives at a distance that may or may not be bridged. Lennon was living outside London, in privileged seclusion with a young family, where he was stewing in existential doubts. His contributions were focused on the dismantling of reality, whether through the use of narcotics or the loss of mortality.

‘You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born,’ he sings on the loose, incandescent ‘She Said She Said’, where Ringo Starr absolutely swings behind his drum kit, and Lennon would combine his obsessions on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, a song that closes the album with the exhortation to ‘surrender to the void’. The lyrics were inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, via counterculture seer Timothy Leary, and were matched to instrumental loops, backwards tracking, potent percussion and a heavily processed vocal. With its lysergic shards and restorative drones – you can dance to the song or disappear into it – ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ helped detonate psychedelic rock. But to the Beatles it was just another idea to explore, not a genre to base a career around.

‘Their ideas were beginning to become much more potent in the studio. They would start telling me what they wanted and pressing me for more ideas and for more ways of translating those ideas into reality,’ George Martin subsequently noted, and for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ they pulled out all the stops. To achieve Lennon’s wavering, hypnotic vocal in the track’s latter half (Lennon famously told Martin he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting on a hilltop) they had to open up a recording console and literally alter the circuitry.

That, in essence, was what Lennon was trying to do to his own psyche. Even when he was writing the album’s catchiest guitar-based tune, ‘Doctor Robert’, Lennon was referencing a physician happy to prescribe highs for his patients, and drugs would be a reference point that the band’s members would all log into for the album. Paul McCartney wrote the exuberantly celebratory ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ about marijuana, picking up on the horndriven soul music that was coming out of America in the wake of the R&B blasts that the Beatles were originally turned on by.

Unlike Lennon, McCartney was living in central London, and his influences were external, from art galleries to experimental music gatherings. On Revolver he supplied the most eclectic selection of tracks, sometimes embracing the studio experimentation but also creating a contrast by treating his ballads with unadorned precision. ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ took the layered harmonies of the Beach Boys and married them to a bittersweet melody that perfectly conveyed the intersection of love and outright need. ‘I want her everywhere and if she’s beside me/I know I need never care,’ he sings, and the song’s beauty never quite extinguishes the hint of doubt.

The Beatles recording Revolver (left to right): John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr

As they’d begun to do on 1965’s Rubber Soul (a bridgehead to Revolver’s advances), the songwriters looked at society with fresh eyes, questioning not just the public deficits and failings, but how the smallest pieces could sit slightly apart. ‘Eleanor Rigby’, starkly scored by a string octet, moves with a novelist’s eyes across a modern city, intertwining the lonely woman of the first verse with the diligent, boxed-in priest of the second, so that the woman is buried in the final verse with no-one to mark her passing except the priest, who wipes the dirt from his hand as he walks away from her grave.

In between the achievements of the Lennon– McCartney union, George Harrison also comes of age as a songwriter on Revolver, using his passion for the Indian sitar to provide a new sound on the evocative raga rock of ‘Love You To’. ‘I Want to Tell You’ is a celebration of how songwriting let him express himself, with the unease conveyed by the melding of drums and piano, and the indignant groove of ‘Taxman’ is quite possibly the only song decrying excessive taxation rates for the rich to make it into the rock & roll canon.

So much of what the Beatles managed, seemingly without effort on the finished recordings, created a new strand for pop music. But they were not merely pioneers who were soon to be eclipsed. They were the first and they were the best, and Revolver is their most timeless recording, suspended for all time in their genius. It is the album where the potential of the Beatles is most fully realised, while their failings are virtually absent. Praise can barely do justice to this brilliantly inventive record.