Stuff

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.

2025 already.

We’re starting the year doing something so many people seem to do but always get wrong. We’re taking all the studio albums by The Beatles and ranking them, best to worst, or rather worst to best.

You can yawn if you want, but so many folk do it and so why not us?

A few rules. Only UK studio albums, no live recordings. No compilations. No foreign versions. Only 12″ vinyl records. Nothing issued much after they broke up (really) like re-mixes or anthology projects or collections (but we accept Let It Be). No solo stuff. No early works from Germany. No bootlegs.

Just the 11 core albums, issued on Parlophone or Apple which are:

• Please Please Me
• With The Beatles
• A Hard Day’s Night
• Beatles For Sale
• Help!
• Rubber Soul
• Revolver
• Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
• The Beatles
• Abbey Road
• Let It Be

No Magical Mystery Tour as that was not issued as a 12″ in the UK at the time. We wondered about Yellow Submarine, not the songtrack but the original. More than half of that is not Beatles, and, of the six Beatles’ tracks, two had been issued before. So we have ignored it.

We’re using our original mono (except the last two) pressings, no supervinyl or remixes or anything modern and different, no digital or streaming. These are the albums as they came out, things we bought at the time and still have and still play.

You can vote for best or worst.

As for the rest, well, if you disagree you can tell us…