A much-maligned epitaph for a trailblazing career, The Beatles’ final album ‘Let It Be’ turns fifty years old.
An album of fantastic technical ability and tremendous emotional poignancy, The Beatles’ final album ‘Abbey Road’ is an enduring masterpiece.
Although forged during a period of professional turmoil, ‘The White Album’ feels like the most relevant and urgent Beatles album 50 years on.
A double EP in Britain and a full album in the States, ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ is an interesting curio in The Beatles’ catalogue, and a full-stop to a brilliant 1967.
The Beatles’ third album was their first to consist entirely of original compositions, and captures the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania.
Massively expanding the potential for what an album could actually be, there can be few albums as important to the development of pop music than ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’.
by Ed Biggs By the time 1966 rolled around, The Beatles had unquestionably re-asserted their primacy in British pop music as a creative force, in addition to their long-standing commercial triumphs which had never shown any sign of flagging. Rubber Soul, hot on the heels of Help! in 1965, had been one of pop’s greatest artistic achievements, and their relentless touring schedule had ground on in the face of exhaustion. But
Continue reading…
by Ed Biggs 1965 proved to be the making of The Beatles as a long-term artistic force. In an era where careers could be over within months, never mind years, the band had enjoyed a dazzling run of creativity and bagged a shedload of hit singles in the first three years of their career, but by 1965 were at risk of being outflanked by newcomers. The Who and The Rolling Stones
by Ed Biggs As both we and many others studying them have said before, The Beatles are a deceptively simple band to analyse, since so much of their fame and so many of their achievements look inevitable or preordained with the benefit of hindsight. However, their epoch-defining success was not as smooth as a cursory glance makes it appear. Mid-1965 presented the first of (arguably) two existential crises they faced in
