The Beatles (1968)

I've no doubt that whole books have been written about the white album - as I'm not going to call it - but I haven't read any of them, have no plans to read any of them, and I'm not even going to do any internet homework with this one in the hope of coming to it absolutely fresh, as I suspect the lads would have wanted; and because I have a theory that this was the whole point of the album.

The Beatles were the first pop band I noticed when I was a kid, mainly because their music kept turning up on the telly and with such frequency that I began to recognise a few of the songs and asked my mum about them. The Magical Mystery Tour album turned up one Christmas in response, followed by Yellow Submarine, Sgt. Pepper and Rubber Soul all within the next six months. I planned to get the rest but I suspect the strain of saving up my pocket money month after month was getting a bit much; then I discovered punk rock, and eventually began to find everyone still banging on about the fab four two decades after the event a little exhausting. It wasn't that I'd had a change of heart so much as a change of focus, and it had become difficult to listen to the Beatles what with their music still getting heavy airplay on every radio station everywhere in the universe. You can only have so much of a good thing.

Eventually it died down so much that I no longer found myself subjected to Penny Lane on a daily basis, and I began to wonder what those other Beatles records had sounded like, and so I picked up where I'd left off as a sort of favour to my nine-year old self.

Happily, it's quite easy to apply fresh ears to the eponymous 1968 double because, of its thirty tracks, I count only three which have suffered from the same overexposure as Hey Jude and the rest. Dear Prudence I recognise mainly from the Banshees cover, and there are bits and pieces I recall as having been sampled on Jay-Z's Grey Album, but otherwise there's a lot here which I've never heard before. In case you missed the inference of that sentence, the significant detail is songs by the Beatles which I've never heard before, which seems pleasantly incredible in the second decade of the twenty-first century. More specifically, for me this means Beatles without baggage, without specific lines or riffs conjuring unwanted images of smirking regional television reporters introducing light-hearted news features about a foolish resident of a hill or a woman named Lucy who has her own jewellery business on the Isle of Skye.

What with the plain white cover and general lack of flash, I get the idea that the Beatles were trying to get away from being the Beatles, or at least from what the Beatles had become in terms of their fame - hence, I guess, the seemingly sarcastic revelations of Glass Onion which must surely have been addressed to those reading far too much into the back catalogue. To invoke what probably wasn't yet a cliché in 1968, it was just about the music, man.

Yet The Beatles is no reductionist return to basics, and is at least as progressive and experimental as the fab and swinging sixties albums which preceded it, arguably more so with the likes of Revolution 9, inspired doubtless by persons such as Pierre Schaeffer and actually much easier on the ear than its legend would suggest. Of course, they do return to basics on tracks such as the frankly still fucking incredible Back in the USSR which seemingly takes the piss out of the Beach Boys - something else I hadn't really noticed until now; but they were doing something with those basics - inventing heavy metal as some have argued, although I'm not convinced by that one - and they were doing it as the reinvestment they wanted to hear without intrusively commercial considerations. I'd say this holds true for most of the album despite that we're still talking about the Beatles rather than Arnold Schoenberg, so it pops but entirely on their terms; and as such comes across as a surprisingly intimate work compared with the more overt populism of the previous efforts. It's almost talking to itself with just one other individual in the room, that being yourself, the listener - which additionally provides, I suppose, some insight as to why Charles Manson believed the Beatles were sending secret messages specifically to him on this record.

It's become fairly easy to lose sight of why anyone ever liked this bunch, and I still refuse to believe that their legend deserves to eclipse any other legend you may care to name; and excepting Ringo, I found the solo material mostly underwhelming, but something about the combination of the four of them was genuinely wonderful and I'm impressed that an album of a full half-century vintage can still yield surprises, and so many.