The first album had been a big success, and a second was needed for the Xmas market in 1963.
The Beatles had been touring, performing on tv and busy.
The album followed the pattern of the first. Fourteen tracks, six covers and eight originals.
It’s a fine album. All My Loving is on here, Money (That’s What I Want), It Won’t Be Long are here and stand out. Boys, Till There Was You and Don’t Bother Me are not a good fit.
But it’s fine. And it sold in bucket loads.
No matter what you put at the bottom of a list, someone is going to say “it’s my favourite, it’s this good and that great…” and so on.
Some people have said this should be thought of as a double album with Revolver. We beg to differ. The cover is poor, and the back still looks like a Fab Four album.
What are our problems with this? It’s a bit folky for us, too much Dylan and Byrds. Many of the songs are pretty dirge-like. There’s nothing wrong with an odd song like that, but we have Girl, Michelle, If I Needed Someone, What Goes On… It’s a bit lethargic, it sounds tired.
Some of the tracks are rejects from Help! or other, earlier albums, and they sound like it.
We listen to this, and at the end we think “ok, ho hum, it’s nothing special”. As a whole we find it unmemorable at best. There are odd bits of goodness in the barely 35 minutes, but it’s just not quite there. If any other band had made it, it would be up there with their best, just here it’s not.
For people who think it’s one of The Beatles best, fine, but we think it is very over-rated. We’re not the only ones.
This is a controversial choice for bottom of the list, but maybe some people agree.
There has been so much in recent years about the film Let It Be, the restored outtakes and revamped album with extras. And I remember seeing it when it first came out, at the Capitol cinema with Yellow Submarine as support.
There are no comments about any of that. We are here to talk about the album as an album.
It came with a book (mine is falling apart, of course, they do, but not too bad, nor are all the sleeve and inserts in such a bad condition). It came out in 1970 and is short (by late Beatles’ standards) at barely 35 minutes. This includes short track snippets that amount to nothing, like Dig It, and some talking as filler, irritating filler.
Famously, George Martin did not really produce. He was around during the recordings, but Phil Spector butchered the tracks and this is his work.
The idea was to be filmed rehearsing for a concert and then doing the concert, and this would be the soundtrack to the film. The songs are mostly pretty unexceptional, like no-one had any enthusiasm or any great ideas for what to perform. Some very old oldies were dug out. Other tracks, eg Two Of Us, I’ve Got A Feeling and Dig A Pony are just pretty dull.
