The Most Extraordinary Twelve Months in Pop Music?

How The Beatles went from Help! to Revolver in a single year, and somehow were only getting started.

I have been listening to The Beatles again.

Not that this is an especially unusual occurrence.

But every now and then, despite having known this music for most of my life, something about it strikes me afresh. And recently it was this:

For most bands, Help! would have been the greatest album they ever made.

For The Beatles, it wasn’t even the best album they released in those six months.

Let alone those twelve months.

And I find that quite extraordinary.

Just think about it

Help! came out in August 1965.

It contained Help!, Ticket to Ride, Yesterday and You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.

Most bands would be perfectly happy to have one song of that quality in their catalogue.

Yesterday alone would be enough to secure a songwriter’s reputation. Ticket to Ride still sounds magnificent. Help! takes what could simply have been another irresistible pop song and gives it an emotional vulnerability that perhaps wasn’t immediately obvious beneath the screaming fans and mop-top haircuts.

And You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away sounds like a band starting to absorb influences from somewhere beyond the world of straightforward pop.

If The Beatles had stopped there, Help! would still be remembered as a great album by a great band.

But they didn’t stop.

They barely paused.

Four months later…

In December 1965 came Rubber Soul.

Four months.

Think about how little time that actually is.

Four months after an album containing Yesterday, they had moved on to Norwegian Wood, In My Life, Nowhere Man, Michelle, Girl and Drive My Car.

And somehow it feels different.

Not just better produced, or a slightly more sophisticated version of what had gone before. The songwriting is becoming more thoughtful, more personal and more adventurous. The palette is broader. The harmonies are extraordinary. There are different instruments, different influences and different ways of writing about relationships, memory and life.

In My Life in particular feels like a remarkable leap.

This is John Lennon, still only in his twenties, looking backwards. Places remembered. People loved. People gone. Memory and loss intruding into pop music in a way that feels completely natural.

Then there’s Norwegian Wood, with its sitar and wonderfully ambiguous little story.

Nowhere Man isn’t really a love song at all.

Girl is beautiful, complicated and slightly uncomfortable.

Something is happening.

The Beatles are no longer simply writing exceptionally good pop songs. They are beginning to explore what a pop song can actually be.

And remember: this is only four months after Help!.

And then they did it again

Eight months later, in August 1966, came Revolver.

And this is where the whole thing starts to become faintly ridiculous.

And then, sitting at the end of the album like something that has somehow arrived from the future, Tomorrow Never Knows.

Just look at the progression.

Yesterday.

In My Life.

For No One.

Tomorrow Never Knows.

Twelve months.

From the beautiful simplicity of Yesterday, through the reflection and nostalgia of In My Life, to the devastating melancholy of For No One, and then to the tape loops, drones and sheer sonic adventure of Tomorrow Never Knows.

And consider the sheer variety within Revolver itself.

The string octet of Eleanor Rigby. The exquisite melody of Here, There and Everywhere. The bitterness and vulnerability of For No One. The biting humour of Taxman. The Indian classical influences of Love You To.

And then Tomorrow Never Knows, which still sounds extraordinary sixty years later.

The remarkable thing isn’t simply the quality.

It’s the trajectory.

They keep moving.

And quickly.

And it wasn’t just John and Paul

It’s tempting, when talking about The Beatles’ extraordinary songwriting, to concentrate almost entirely on Lennon and McCartney.

And understandably so.

But that risks overlooking what the other two were bringing to the music.

George Harrison was developing rapidly, not just as a guitarist but as a songwriter with his own distinctive voice.

By Revolver, he had three compositions on the album, including Taxman, which opens the record with a sharpness and confidence that would have been difficult to imagine just a couple of years earlier.

And Love You To takes the exploration of Indian music, hinted at by the sitar on Norwegian Wood, into something much more substantial. This wasn’t simply borrowing an unusual instrument to decorate a pop song. Harrison was becoming genuinely interested in a different musical tradition and beginning to bring it into the heart of The Beatles’ sound.

And then there’s Ringo.

I sometimes think Ringo Starr’s contribution gets lost in discussions about songwriting and musical experimentation.

But listen to his drumming across these records.

The distinctive, almost loping rhythm of Ticket to Ride. The energy and precision of Drive My Car. The wonderfully inventive drumming on Rain, recorded during the Revolver sessions and released as the B-side to Paperback Writer.

And that extraordinary drum sound on Tomorrow Never Knows.

Ringo wasn’t simply keeping time behind three brilliant musicians. His playing was part of what made The Beatles sound like The Beatles.

He had a remarkable instinct for what a song needed, often finding something rhythmically unexpected without ever losing the song itself.

And perhaps that is part of the secret.

Four very different personalities and musicians, each contributing something distinctive, but somehow producing music that could only have come from those four people together.

They could change almost everything about their music and still sound unmistakably like The Beatles.

They didn’t even put everything on the albums

As if all of this weren’t enough, somewhere in the middle they casually released Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out as a double A-side single.

Neither appeared on the original UK versions of Rubber Soul or Revolver.

Imagine having two songs of that quality and not needing them to sell your next album.

Partly, of course, this reflected the very different approach to singles and albums in Britain at the time. There was a genuine expectation that fans shouldn’t have to buy the same songs twice.

But it also tells you something about the extraordinary abundance of material they were producing.

Today, you would struggle to imagine two songs that strong not being used to help sell an album.

The Beatles simply put them out.

And carried on.

And, incidentally, Paperback Writer and Rain followed in June 1966, just two months before Revolver appeared.

Neither was included on the original UK album either.

Really, it’s almost showing off.

And they were doing other things at the same time

This is perhaps the bit I find easiest to forget when looking back from decades later.

The Beatles weren’t disappearing into a studio for three years and eventually emerging with twelve carefully perfected songs.

They were still touring.

They were making films.

They were doing interviews and public appearances.

They were living inside the increasingly surreal phenomenon of Beatlemania.

And amid all of that noise they were somehow finding the time, and perhaps more importantly the mental space, to develop at an extraordinary rate.

Lennon and McCartney were pushing one another. Harrison was finding his own creative direction. Ringo’s distinctive musical instincts helped give the songs their character. And George Martin and the engineers at Abbey Road were helping them discover that the recording studio itself could become an instrument.

Ideas from folk, soul, Indian music, classical music and the emerging counterculture were finding their way into the records.

And they were absorbing all this and turning it back into Beatles music.

Not imitation.

Something new.

They were so young

This is another fact that I have to keep reminding myself of.

When Revolver appeared, the oldest Beatle was just 26.

Twenty-six.

By that age they had already gone from Love Me Do to Tomorrow Never Knows.

There is something almost absurd about that sentence.

Listen to those two records next to one another and they barely seem to belong to the same musical era, let alone the same group separated by less than four years.

And perhaps that is part of what makes The Beatles phenomenon so extraordinary.

We tend to see their career retrospectively, as one complete body of work.

Please Please Me. A Hard Day’s Night. Help!. Rubber Soul. Revolver. Sgt. Pepper. The White Album. Abbey Road…

They sit neatly beside one another on the shelf or the streaming screen.

But they weren’t neat chapters when they were happening.

They were new.

Nobody listening to Help! in August 1965 knew Rubber Soul was four months away.

Nobody buying Rubber Soul at Christmas knew that eight months later they would hear Eleanor Rigby and Tomorrow Never Knows.

There was no map.

Which one is the best?

We can, of course, argue forever about which Beatles album is the best.

And I probably will.

The honest answer for me is that it depends upon the day and the mood I am in.

Sometimes Rubber Soul feels perfect.

Sometimes Revolver seems impossible to beat.

Sometimes Abbey Road wins.

And sometimes there is something about the sheer confidence, colour and audacity of Sgt. Pepper that reminds you why it became such a landmark.

But I’m not sure the really interesting question is which one comes first.

What astonishes me is the concentration of creativity.

Three albums in twelve months, each arguably good enough to be another band’s masterpiece.

And they weren’t merely producing more of the same.

Each one moved somewhere new.

That’s the bit that seems almost impossible.

When success doesn’t make you stand still

Success normally encourages repetition.

If something works, the natural commercial instinct is to do it again.

Give people what they liked last time.

The Beatles could quite easily have kept producing variations on the music that had made them the biggest band in the world.

Instead, at precisely the point when they had more to lose than almost anyone else in popular music, they became more adventurous.

That is quite an interesting definition of creativity.

Not simply having ideas.

Not simply being good at something.

But being willing to leave behind something you already know works.

And perhaps even more remarkably, doing so without losing what makes you distinctive.

Yesterday, In My Life, Tomorrow Never Knows and A Day in the Life are radically different pieces of music.

And yet every one of them is unmistakably The Beatles.

They weren’t abandoning who they were.

They were discovering what else they could become.

Help! works.

Then comes Rubber Soul.

Rubber Soul works magnificently.

Then comes Revolver.

And Revolver doesn’t sound like a band settling comfortably into success.

It sounds like four young men wondering:

What happens if we try this?

And the really ridiculous thing?

After Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver, you might reasonably think they had reached some sort of creative peak.

For my money, some of their greatest songwriting was still to come.

And perhaps the song that gets me most is She’s Leaving Home.

It is barely even a pop song in the conventional sense. It is a short story set to music. A girl quietly leaves home; her parents wake to discover she has gone; and, heartbreakingly, we are allowed to see both sides.

There is no simple villain.

The daughter isn’t simply ungrateful. The parents aren’t simply uncaring. They love her, but somehow they haven’t understood her. And their bewildered reaction contains one of the saddest ideas in the song: they have given her everything they thought she needed, and cannot comprehend why that wasn’t enough.

That’s what makes it so good.

It isn’t really just a song about a girl leaving home.

It is about the terrible distance that can sometimes exist between loving somebody and understanding them.

And Lennon and McCartney were still only in their twenties when they wrote it.

But She’s Leaving Home was hardly an isolated moment.

Because, of course, the really extraordinary thing is what was still to come.

Just read those titles again.

Songs that would have defined the careers of almost any other band.

And none of them had even been released when Revolver came out.

In August 1966, after producing Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver in the space of twelve months, they weren’t approaching the end of their extraordinary journey.

They were still only partway through it.

And less than four years later, it was all over.

Perhaps somebody somewhere has equalled The Beatles for individual songs, musicianship or albums. Those arguments are subjective, and always will be.

But that isn’t really my point.

To be that good is one thing.

To produce that much good music is another.

But to be changing so quickly at the same time, continually moving beyond yesterday’s incredibly successful version of yourselves in search of tomorrow’s one?

I’m not sure popular music has ever seen anything quite like it.

I’m even less sure that it ever will again.

To paraphrase Daniel Finkelstein:

The Beatles may be the most underrated band in history. However highly you rate them, you’re probably still underrating them.

Which sounds faintly ridiculous when you’re talking about probably the most celebrated band in popular music.

And yet, when you look at what they actually did, and how quickly they did it, I think I know exactly what he means.

And the wonderful thing is that I can have known these songs for most of my life and still occasionally look at the dates, put the records together in my head and think:

Good grief. They really were astonishing, weren’t they?