Revolver — 1966

Background

Revolver was recorded in the spring of 1966, immediately after The Beatles had stopped touring in all but name, and the freedom from live performance shows immediately — this is the first Beatles album built around studio techniques that simply couldn't be reproduced on stage with the technology of the time. George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick pushed EMI's four-track equipment to its limits, bouncing tracks down and back up to squeeze more instrumentation onto tape than the machines were ever designed to hold.

Studio experimentation

'Tomorrow Never Knows' closes the album and is still regularly cited as the moment popular music changed direction — a single droning C chord underpins the whole track, built from a tambura and a heavily processed drum loop, while John Lennon's vocal was fed through a Leslie speaker cabinet (designed for Hammond organs) to give it a swirling, otherworldly quality. Five tape loops of manipulated sounds — a laughing seagull-like effect made from a sped-up guitar, an orchestral chord, a Mellotron flute sound among them — were mixed live by hand across multiple tape machines during the final mixdown, meaning no two early mixes were ever quite identical. 'Eleanor Rigby' went the opposite direction entirely: a string octet arranged by George Martin, with no guitars, bass or drums anywhere on the track, telling one of the bleakest lyrics the band ever recorded — the loneliness of a woman who dies unnoticed and unmourned.

Range

Few albums move across as much ground as Revolver does in half an hour: Harrison's 'Taxman' opens the record with a biting satire of Britain's supertax rate delivered over one of the sharpest guitar riffs of the era; 'Yellow Submarine' is a children's singalong with a full cast of sound effects; 'Got to Get You into My Life' is essentially a Motown pastiche built around a horn section; and 'Here, There and Everywhere' is a McCartney ballad often cited as one of the most perfectly constructed melodies of his career. The sequencing refuses to settle into a single mood, which is precisely the point — this is a band demonstrating that an album no longer had to sound like one thing.

Legacy

Revolver is frequently ranked as The Beatles' single greatest achievement — ahead of even Sgt. Pepper, which arrived a year later and got more contemporary press attention for its conceptual ambition. Where Sgt. Pepper announced itself as an Important Album, Revolver did something arguably harder: it expanded what a rock record could sound like while still functioning, song for song, as a set of genuinely great pop songs. Its influence runs through psychedelia, art-rock and virtually every studio-as-instrument approach that followed.