The Beatles – remastered box set – any good?

I’ve been offline for about three or four hundred years now, mainly because Sky are morons. Now, if you’re reading this and you work for Sky, please don’t take that as a personal affront – but Sky are morons. And if you’re one of the people I or Sarah spoke to trying to set our phone line up, you actually are a moron. Anyway – what better way to welcome myself back online, I thought, than a Beatles blog. And what more appropriate and topical Beatles blog could there be than a full scale epic review of the recently released re-mastered CDs. I bought mine in a giddy rush during a lunch break and proceeded to spend every journey to and from work for the next two weeks listening avidly back through the world’s most famous back-catalogue. And I thought there might be like-minded Beatles fans out there who are concerned about whether or not it would be worth it to buy these CDs when they already own every last thing the Beatles ever recorded, like I do.

There are a number of problems with reviewing something like this, and the main one is that Beatles fans can’t resist a good opportunity to eulogise the band, and I will try and avoid that – but at the same time I make no apologies whatsoever for the times that I do it. The Beatles are my favourite band, and while they occasionally curled out a steamer (see my earlier blog on that topic), and it’s arguably fair to say that they never made an album without a fairly rubbish song on it, when they were good, they were really very very good.

Another problem is that this is a re-mastering, not a remixing. The Love album from a couple of years ago was remixed, and it was (to my humble ears) a revelation. But this is just the exact same songs in the same order that they’ve always been. So there’s relatively little to say about it. It sounds loads better, and so you should buy it if you like the Beatles. But that wouldn’t do as a blog. So, let’s begin at the beginning.

1962 – 1970, The Beatles release studio albums and however many singles it was. Lots of people like them, swinging 60s, love and peace, drugs and psychedelia, bigger than Jesus, blah blah, good good. Oh, all albums are released on LPs. They think they can be businessmen and set up Apple. They fail miserably. They fall out a lot and get bored of each other, and split up so George can do meditation stuff, John can live with Yoko, Paul can live on a farm, and Ringo can go country, and mental.

1970 – 1980, everyone keeps asking the Beatles if they will reform, and they say no. They slag each other off in songs. All release at least one good album, and at least one stinker. McCartney forms Wings, has mental success. Lennon doesn’t really do anything consistently, Harrison meditates and runs out of material and Ringo goes country, then goes mental. Loads of Beatles compilation albums come out – they are largely rubbish.

1980 – John Lennon is murdered outside his home. People are sad.

1981 – 1987 – People miss John. Other Beatles respond to sad loss by being terrible at music, a lot.

1987 – The Beatles catalogue is mixed for Compact Disc, which is a new-fangled technology. People who bought the LPs are very cross, because the sound is a bit drudge, and they start bemoaning the lack of quality and “how dare they, this is the Beatles and blah blah” and all the rest.

1996 – Beatles Anthology is released. New songs are recorded. They are great. Albums of old out-takes are released, they’re mediocre. TV show is put together, it is rubbish – well, apart from the first episode. Harrison and McCartney pretend they like each other, it’s clear they don’t. Ringo talks in half Scouse, half American accent, McCartney bobbles his head, Harrison appears remarkably chirpy for someone who didn’t want to do it, Lennon’s absence is hugely conspicuous. Beatles fans rush out and buy it, and go “don’t they look young” at the old footage of the band in the cavern. They do.

1997 – 2008 – Everyone babbles on about the Beatles, swinging 60s, love and peace, drugs and psychedelia, bigger than Jesus, blah blah, good good. George Harrison dies, which is sad. He and McCartney make up which is nice. McCartney suddenly remembers how to be a brilliant songwriter and makes good albums again. Ringo randomly gets a monk on about signing memorabilia and posts a message online about peace and love while simultaneously showing neither to anyone.

2009 – The Beatles Rock Band is announced. Beatle fans can’t work out if this is selling out or not. Music critics decide John would not be happy. People who actually knew him say he would. This annoys most people, as it is mind-numbingly irrelevant. Giles Martin is son of George Martin, Beatles producing genius. Giles Martin realises that there have been 20 years of technological progress since the CDs last came out. Like a genius, decides to remaster the original tapes so they don’t sound gash. They are released, I buy them.

And here we are!

And so, onto my opinions about the CDs. Well, first of all, there isn’t much of a notable improvement in the early albums, but there was never going to be. Their first album was recorded in a day, using absolutely no studio techniques, so in terms of an adventurous sonic landscape, there’s not much to work with. Also, the songs aren’t really very good. Even George Martin admits that when he first met them, it was their attitude and energy that attracted him to the band, not the fact that they were any good at song-writing, because they weren’t. And all the remastering in the world can’t hide that fact. But of course, if you’re going to end up being lauded for the speed and dexterity of your songwriting development – you have to have a starting marker, and from Please Please Me, while it isn’t true that the only way was up, they certainly didn’t have to move mountains to improve. The quality is undoubtedly clearer than it was on the 87 issue, but really if you can tell the difference, then you’ve been listening to too much Beatles. I noticed the difference immediately. This is true for Please Please Me, With The Beatles AND A Hard Days Night – although those albums do showcase a genuinely meteoric rise in quality of songwriting, performance, studio knowhow, musicianship and delivery – they were still recorded on rubbish 4 track, and while the quality again is noticeable, there isn’t any kind of revelation in terms of what you can hear and how it’s been cleaned up.

But then along comes Beatles For Sale – and the difference suddenly becomes truly apparent. The murky quality of this tired and rushed album has been polished to a beautiful shine – and in fact, listening to Rock and Roll Music and Kansas City is like hearing new songs. The rest of the album is quite obviously better, and there are points when it feels like new material – and it’s fabulous. Not the best album originally, and not the best now either, but at the very least you can hear it as it was meant to be heard. Once you’ve dispensed with the first 4 albums, you get on to the most critically acclaimed period in the band’s history. Now, there was nothing wrong with Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt Pepper in 1987, but it is great to hear them sounding so sharp, with the instrumentation coming more to the fore. Ringo was oft maligned as a drummer, even by Lennon at one point (when asked if Starr was the best drummer in the world, Lennon famously replied that he wasn’t the best drummer in the Beatles) – and while that may have been hilarious and cheeky, people seem to have jumped atop that bandwagon with all the hurried enthusiasm of Daily Mail readers when they want to blame foreigners for something, complain about something they didn’t hear on the radio or lament the loss of Princess Diana. But listen to the way that drummers (or in fact anyone who understands music) talk about Ringo. Hushed tones, my friends – and on these albums we start to see why. The rhythm section that he formed with McCartney (who is another under-rated musician in my opinion) is remarkable, and it is brought right to the fore here. In a time before click tracks and Pro Tools, Ringo was the glue that held that group together, and you can hear his effectiveness as a drummer finally get the airing it deserves. Peace and Love.

That being said, Ringo also sings sometimes, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the only way you could remaster “What Goes On” and “Yellow Submarine” into listenable tracks is if you wiped the tape completely. And they haven’t. It’s too bad, because they were awful before, but now they’re crystal clear awful.

Sgt Pepper is disappointingly un-different. I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but it didn’t quite deliver. That being said, it’s a brilliant album which is suddenly much better to listen to, and you can’t argue too far with that.

The White Album was always a bit of a sprawling mess, and again, the remastering doesn’t help it much. The Beatles could be excused below-par material on their first album since it was their first album and nobody knew what below-par really meant for the band, but by 1968 they really should have known better. Not only are some of the songs absolutely awful, but actually the whole album resembles something that was recorded in a skip, with little or no effort paid to mixing, and in some cases, tuning. This isn’t solved by the remastering, and I suppose it’s right that it isn’t – after all, if you start messing too much with levels etc, you run the risk of remixing it, and while that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea, it isn’t the point here. BUT – for every Bungalow Bill, there is a Blackbird. If McCartney ever wrote a more endearing love song than “I Will”, I’d like someone to play it to me. Now it is as clear as the Indian day on which it was written, and can’t be flawed really. Helter Skelter retains its near violent hysteria and is all the meaner and more virulent now. The arrangement of “Good Night”, already lush, takes on new dimensions. Revolution 9 is still a bit of a mauling, but a bit of tape cleaner was never going to change that sad fact. This album was always one of the murkier in the Beatles canon – partly because the band were getting stroppy with each other, and so couldn’t be bothered, and George Martin left because he got sick of them fighting and so the production gang was effectively the youth team. But the best of a bad job has been made of the album and the sound is about as good as you could hope for – and it’s a relief for someone who has always been ambivalent about the White Album.

Yellow Submarine is a strange album to add to the canon – most of the songs on it had already been released, and the second side is entirely made up of instrumentals by George Martin – which are actually very nice to listen to, but still seem a bit odd. The songs that we hadn’t heard before should really have stayed that way. All Together Now, Only A Northern Song, and It’s All Too Much add nothing but a sense of atypical sloth in terms of songwriting and production. I suppose it all needs to be covered in the catalogue, but if you’re going through the albums, just listen to the second half of this one. I love the Beatles dearly, but little on God’s earth could entice me to listen to this album again. When you only made 13 albums, and are considered one of the greatest bands of all time, then a half-arsed selection like this shouldn’t be among your offerings.

Let It Be has already been remastered, and remixed into a new album – the fan-dividing-but-nevertheless-let’s-be-honest-now-it’s-absolutely-loads-better-than-the-original-except-for-maybe-I’ve-Got-A-Feeling-but-other-than-that-it-is Let it Be...Naked. So the only new things we really get to hear on this album are Maggie Mae and Dig It – and who cares about them anyway? They were terrible the first time and they’re terrible now. So, nothing wrong with it, but nothing amazing either. I was struck on re-listening to the album just how good the title track is. Just an aside there.

Abbey Road has always been a pleasant listening experience. In fact, I would probably have rated it as my favourite Beatles album before the remastering, and that opinion is only enforced by the updated version. I never hated Maxwell’s Silver Hammer as much as everyone else (including every Beatle that wasn’t McCartney) does – or Octopus’ Garden either for that matter, being as it is about three million times better than Starr’s other compositional credit, Don’t Pass Me By. As for the other songs, McCartney’s gravel on Oh Darling, Harrison’s tender guitar solo on Something, Lennon’s anguished cries on I Want You and the transcendent beauty of Because are glorious in their clarity – as are the drum fills of Here Comes The Sun, the harmonies on You Never Give Me Your Money and the scorching guitar solos of “The End”. Even Her Majesty sounds better. There was nothing wrong with this album, but they fixed it anyway, and for once, that tactic worked to perfection.

And finally the Past Masters CDs. Well, the same goes for them as went for all the other albums. The early songs sound very similar, and the later songs begin to take on a clarity that wasn’t available back in the mid to late 1960s when they were recorded. You Know My Name is still ridiculous, but is genuinely hilarious in parts, and a nice note on which to close the singles collection. The two German songs are still on there, sounding exactly the same as they always did – that is to say, nice novelty but actually a waste of two tracks on the CD, and other than that, the songs are brilliant and a timely reminder of a time when artists didn’t put their singles on their albums. The Beatles canon is already considered a masterpiece, what would we have thought had Sgt Pepper contained Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields? If Let It Be had been permitted the odd but wonderful Old Brown Shoe, if Rubber Soul had replaced What Goes On and Run for Your Life with Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out? How about Revolver not having Paperback Writer on it or the fact that I Want To Hold Your Hand and She Loves You never appeared on an album? Why were Lady Madonna, Hey Bulldog, The Inner Light and Hey Jude left off the White Album when Wild Honey Pie, Bungalow Bill, Revolution 9, and Don’t Pass Me By stayed on? Who can say – still, makes you think.

If you like the Beatles, then you will be glad you bought this. If you don’t like them then this isn’t going to change your mind. But for my twopenneth, I didn’t half have fun rediscovering the music I grew up to. God Bless those four lads and their cheeky mop-top/acid gobbling ways.