Beatles

Writing about the Beatles is at once the easiest and most dangerous thing that can happen to a music-obsessed omnivore like myself, an admitted card-carrying member of the party that ranks them among the standard-bearers of one's own musical heritage.

Unlike almost all so-called tranchant cultural phenomena, the Liverpool quartet isn't simply loved or hated by those who judge their work. The range of opinion is practically endless: there are those who adore them, those who call them the most overrated band in history, those who despise them beyond reason, those who know only the famous hits and those who prefer the deeper cuts, dismissing as merely pleasant the very anthems born of their creative genius. There are certainly those who assign them a fundamental role in the history of music, even the most important one, and those who argue they were more revolutionary in the first part of their career - the so-called beat years - than in the psychedelic, more studied phase that followed just a few years later.

The aim of this article, however, is not to fall back into a bare, straightforward analysis of one of the cornerstone records of pop-rock, which would only add - along with a high dose of monotony - to the millions of others already written, and to the many more still to come, padding out websites, books and magazines.

Riding the momentum sparked by the simultaneous release of the sumptuous "Super Deluxe" edition, meticulously restored by Giles Martin (son of the great George) and sound engineer Sam Okell, the feeling that listening to "Revolver" first stirred in me, back when I was first getting to know it, has resurfaced in full force.

The Beatles entered my life as a teenager, around the age of fifteen, thanks to a C90 cassette recorded by a friend. As we used to say back then, I asked him to dub me that record with the red cover I'd spotted on his shelf (the "1962-1966" compilation), an album that gathered, in chronological order, the early era of the much-hyped Liverpool quartet: "Please Please Me", "I Want To Hold Your Hand", "Can't Buy Me Love", "Help!", "Yesterday", among many others - all iconic tracks from that great season of Beatlemania.

Delving into the more obscure corners of that Greatest Hits, I set off on a research journey that led me, again in strict chronological order, to pore over every one of the LPs from which most of those songs had been drawn.

The odd question that popped into my head - a strange one, I admit - was why this compilation stopped at 1966, and not 1965 or 1967. The answer to that puzzle, at least as far as I'm concerned, lies in the fourteen tracks that make up "Revolver", the true watershed that in 1966 drew the dividing line between the early and the later Beatles.

Those songs contain the full extraordinary artistic and personal growth of a quartet that, only four years earlier, had debuted with "Love Me Do", a charming and fun little tune, but one that bore almost no resemblance whatsoever to the material found on "Revolver" - not even to its most immediate-sounding moments.

Far be it from me to try to diminish the weight of absolute monuments such as "Abbey Road", the multifaceted "The Beatles - White Album" or the much-lauded "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", but nothing will ever shake my personal conviction that the truest innovation brought about by the four lads who grew up on the banks of the Mersey - their boldest and most experimental leap - took shape in this extraordinary sequence of ideas, refined into an LP with an as exemplary as paradoxical black-and-white cover, designed by their friend Klaus Voormann and even honoured with a Grammy.

"Revolver" came out on 5 August 1966, just a handful of days before the band's final live performance, the concert on 29 August at Candlestick Park in San Francisco that marked the end - until the famous "Rooftop Concert" of 1969 - of that kind of activity.

For some time, the Fab Four's veins had been running with experimentation, with more complex harmonic structures, a musical proposition that would have been decidedly hard to reproduce live. The quartet had the chance to explore the terrain opened up by avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, above all thanks to a meeting that Paul McCartney had with the great Luciano Berio.

Although the writing of the new songs was, at least in its core dynamics, increasingly less the product of collective effort and more the result of individual research, the band was still a long way from the gradual breakdown in personal relationships that would lead, only four years later, to the group's implosion. The Beatles were still a cohesive unit, on their way to reaching the artistic peaks of 1966-67.

Even so, their personal and artistic growth made them aware that they had already set off down different paths. Paul McCartney had thrown himself into discovering classical music and experimenting with all sorts of forms, George Harrison was drifting toward mysticism, drawn in by his immersion in Indian philosophy and the music of Ravi Shankar, John Lennon was absorbed in exploring and expanding his own inner space, spurred on too by his use of LSD, while Ringo Starr - the least caught up in this search for new horizons - served as the essential trait d'union counterbalancing any centrifugal forces.

For me it was love at first listen.

The traits mentioned above are unmistakably evident in the run of songs that, even when broadening the assessment to include later output, solo work included, pull the very best from each songwriter's catalogue.

Paul McCartney paints one of his finest portraits ever in the two minutes of "Eleanor Rigby," a melancholy tale dealing with the drama of loneliness, centred on the titular Eleanor, a wistful girl caught picking up the rice left outside a church where a joyful wedding has just taken place. It's a situation she had longed for and waited for, but which, tragically, never came true for her: the worst possible ending, death, catches up with her precisely, and not by accident, within the silent walls of that very church. The funeral, attended by no one, is conducted by Father McKenzie, a priest who has spent years writing sermons that no one has ever really listened to. Powerful, harrowing images, made even more affecting by the towering arrangement for double string section, amplified using studio microphones that further sharpened every painful detail.

From this incipit, it's clear that the carefree tales of happily holding hands, loving each other tenderly, and all manner of similarly charming (and profitable) sentimentality had, by this point, vanished for good. From this moment on, pop is no longer a mere disciple of so-called high culture, but becomes a rival of real substance, running alongside it on equal footing.

But within the Beatles, this hunger for novelty and desire to chart new paths becomes, for now at least, a healthy rivalry to outdo one another.

George Harrison answers with the corrosive irony of the opener "Taxman," whose opening "One, Two, Three, Four" seems to warn the listener to brace themselves, because something new and electrifying is about to begin. In the song, George levels his none-too-subtle accusation at the British tax system. The track has often been cited, beyond its influence on the later development of the entire British psychedelic movement, as a forerunner of mod-style pop and, by extension, of the whole punk-rock strain that would go on to inherit many of its features.

And then there's John Lennon, who delivers one of the seminal gems of the entire psychedelic culture, "Tomorrow Never Knows," which represented the highest level of innovation the Beatles – or anyone else, for that matter – had produced up to that point. Written by John after an acid trip followed by a reading of Timothy Leary's "The Psychedelic Experience," "Tomorrow Never Knows" is a roughly four-minute journey marked by an endless string of unprecedented elements. The hypnotic, slowed-down drumming of the ever-underrated Ringo Starr; Lennon's voice doubled in the first half of the song thanks to automatic double tracking – invented at Abbey Road that very week – and, for the second half, run through the rotating speaker of a Hammond organ's Leslie cabinet, in order to satisfy Lennon's request that it sound "like the Dalai Lama and a thousand chanting Tibetan monks on a mountaintop"; but above all, the tape loops – strips of magnetic tape recorded and spliced into loops to create a continuously cycling signal, something never before used in pop music – along with bizarre seagull/redskin sound effects created by manipulating one of Paul's laughs, an orchestral chord in B-flat major, a mellotron played on its flute setting and another mellotron played on its string setting, plus an ascending sitar scale: together they form an inexhaustible array of solutions that would have left even the most jaded listener stunned.

But the excellence of "Revolver" is by no means exhausted there.

McCartney's astonishing gift for crafting introspective ballads with unrepeatable melodies (the sublime "For No One," with harpsichord and French horn endlessly circling the verses of a broken love, and the vividly imaginative "Here, There And Everywhere"), alongside chapters of unusual radiance ("Good Day Sunshine") and refined excursions in Motown style ("Got To Get You Into My Life"), stands side by side with Lennon's exuberant flair, always at the forefront when it comes to leaving a bold mark of his own inexhaustible songwriting genius (the controversial figure of "Doctor Robert," who seems to have a solution for every problem; the propulsive "And Your Bird Can Sing"; the kaleidoscopic invective of "She Said She Said"; and the lysergic drowsiness of "I'm Only Sleeping," with its guitar notes recorded on tape and then played backwards).

Harrison, by now emerging unchallenged from the undeserved background role he had been relegated to until then, had for some time been swept up by Indian culture and music, as documented by the dazzling "Love You Too," led by his beloved sitar (an instrument that had already made an appearance on "Rubber Soul" with "Norwegian Wood"), which serves as the absolute protagonist in ferrying the listener into the Eastern intellectual heritage and, by the artist's own design, is focused on highlighting the profound differences with the consumerism-driven West. The fascinating irregularities that mark "I Want To Tell You," one of the most atypical songs to come from Harrison's pen, conceal a deceptively intricate technical construction built on patterns that even McCartney called among the most complex he'd ever had to work with.

The more attentive readers will be thinking: what about "Yellow Submarine"? Well, alongside this gargantuan feast, discussing a track that seems simple, fun, and famous beyond measure feels almost like a joke, but the reality is slightly different.

Written mainly by Paul and sung by Ringo, since it was deemed not too demanding to perform and therefore perfect for covering the drummer's beloved fanbase, "Yellow Submarine" fits perfectly, in its colourful guise, into this grand feast, packed as it is with wacky sound effects and content that only seems, on the surface, aimed at a young audience.

The original release at the time (culpably) left out two songs issued only as a single a few months before "Revolver" came out, though they were of the very same calibre and, crucially, came from the same creative sessions – a fairly well-established practice at the time, meant to keep the thriving 7" singles market alive.

"Paperback Writer" and "Rain" made up one of the most remarkable singles of that entire era.

By now freed, as mentioned, from the need to spin little romantic tales, the Beatles deliver on the A-side a landmark, hugely successful song exploring the anguished fears of a paperback writer terrified of going unread and unappreciated. Musically, the track is built around the interplay of guitar and Rickenbacker bass, never before given such prominence (the opening riff is genuinely powerful).

The single's B-side is completed by one of the most successful "flip sides" of all time, certainly the best one the Fab Four ever produced. In "Rain", Lennon's psychedelic mind doesn't portray sun and rain as mere weather phenomena, but as metaphysical states experienced through an altered state of consciousness. The song depicts the mental condition in which the individual feels a quiet surrender within a dreamlike, comforting habitat. "Rain" is also one of the first pop songs to communicate the clear divide between the followers of the psychedelic revolution mapped out by Timothy Leary and the cultural materialism of conservatives. It's in testimonies like this one that the postwar generational gap takes on the philosophical significance that would soon capture the imagination of Western youth.

On a musical level, a significant weight is carried by the technical tricks employed during the recordings. Beyond the techniques used to record the bass - positioning a speaker in front of the instrument and using it as a microphone (a trick also used for "Paperback Writer") - the rhythm track was recorded at a sped-up tempo and then, during playback, slowed down, giving the song a suspended, dazed atmosphere. Finally, in the fade-out, you can hear a tape running backwards, and it's never been established whether this was a lucky accident or a deliberate choice, not least because both Lennon and George Martin, each citing his own memories, firmly claimed credit for that innovation.

Here he is, none other than George Martin, the celebrated "fifth Beatle".

In this picture, we shouldn't forget the fundamental importance of this figure, who guided the Beatles from the control room for weeks on end, with great patience, and who once again proved to be an arranger of limitless skill. The innovations found on "Revolver" - to cite just the vocal harmonies as one example - soon became a benchmark and put artists of the calibre of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys under serious pressure, triggering a major, high-stakes artistic duel between the two bands, as each pushed to outdo the other with world-class records such as "Pet Sounds" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

In fairness, Paul McCartney has also repeatedly acknowledged in public the huge influence the Beach Boys of that period had, in turn, on the Beatles' artistic choices - clear proof of just how attentive, respectful and grateful everyone was towards the constant stylistic originality flowing from minds as brilliant as those mentioned here, among the many others we could list until nightfall.

If it's true that the Beatles were among the pioneers of the musical and cultural transformation of the modern era, "Revolver" is one of the most imposing stones that laid its foundations. After the revolution brought about by this album, the Beatles - and music in general - were never the same again, and, in my own small way, the same goes for my personal sense of how a record should be experienced.

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13/02/2026