Popular music · Rock
1960–1970 · British (Liverpool)
Beat group and psychedelic rock; the British Invasion
The Beatles were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, a Liverpool quartet who moved in seven years from Hamburg beat clubs to the most ambitious studio records in popular music. Managed by Brian Epstein and produced by George Martin at EMI's Abbey Road, they wrote almost all their own material, an unusual thing for a chart act in 1963. They remain the best-selling recording act in history, and the band against whom every later group is measured.
A debut album of 1963 recorded almost entirely in a single day, its sleeve shot looking down a stairwell at EMI's London headquarters (1963)
Please Please Me — taped in under thirteen hours, closing with a throat-shredding Isley Brothers cover; the stairwell photograph at EMI House, Manchester Square, was restaged in 1969.
A 1965 ballad its composer first sang to the dummy lyric 'Scrambled Eggs', recorded with a string quartet and now among the most covered songs ever written (1965)
'Yesterday' — McCartney alone with an acoustic guitar and George Martin's string arrangement; thousands of cover versions have been recorded.
A 1966 album that opens with a tax protest and ends with backwards tape loops and a lyric drawn from the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1966)
Revolver — from Harrison's 'Taxman' to 'Tomorrow Never Knows', the record where the studio became an instrument.
A nautical children's singalong fronted by the drummer, issued as a double A-side with a song about a lonely spinster and a priest (1966)
'Yellow Submarine' / 'Eleanor Rigby' — the latter scored for a double string quartet with no rock instruments at all.
A 1967 concept album framed as a performance by a fictional Edwardian military band, its sleeve a crowd of cardboard celebrities (1967)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band — sleeve by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth; the first rock album to win the Grammy for Album of the Year.
An all-white gatefold double album of 1968, the cover embossed with the group's name and a stamped serial number (1968)
The Beatles, universally called the White Album; sleeve designed by Richard Hamilton, the first copies individually numbered.
A 1969 sleeve of four men striding across a zebra crossing outside their own studio, one of them barefoot (1969)
Abbey Road — photographed by Iain Macmillan on 8 August 1969; the last album the group recorded together, ending with a medley and the line 'and in the end...'.
The group's final album, recorded before its predecessor and remixed by Phil Spector to the bass player's lasting fury (1970)
Let It Be — released May 1970; McCartney's objections to the orchestra and choir added to 'The Long and Winding Road' led eventually to the 2003 'Naked' remix.