The present-day vantage point of some fifty years after the band’s inception provides a timely moment from which to take stock of the Beatles phenomenon, from the variegated angles offered by this collection. Indeed, charting the progression of the Beatles’ ten-year existence is to map astounding developments in popular music during the 1960s, a period not only of great proliferation of musical styles and aesthetico-philosophical upheavals, but also of some of the most significant evolutions in recording techniques (the latter spawning the former in many instances). The band’s openness to currents in art-making – which would later come to be described as postmodern – is key to the artistic revolutions in their work. The impact of their legacy is equally considerable, and this book keeps the broader landscapes in its sights, tracing not only the band’s influence on contemporary and subsequent musical outfits, but also individual members’ careers, along with album re-recordings, remixes and rereleases after the Beatles’ split in 1970. The enduring Beatles ‘brand’ is also addressed in Gary Burns’ and John Kimsey’s insightful chapters respectively, one aspect of which is the band’s indirect responsibility for popular music studies.

The Companion comprises a broad-ranging tripartite format: Background, Works, and History and Influence; it also includes a chronology, a general discography of the US and UK recordings, and a sizeable bibliography of book-length biographical and critical studies of the band. David Laing’s chapter on the formative years gives a cogent account of the lead-up to the Beatles’ gradual emergence from their former incarnation, the Quarrymen, ‘like a butterfly from a chrysalis’, while Michael Frontani’s offering is on the band members’ post-Beatles solo years, ‘alone but inextricably bound to one another … alternately shunning and embracing their storied past’. It is easy from the perspective of 2010 – after half a century of rock groups penning their own material – to forget that British popular music in the late 1950s had no tradition of singers writing and performing their own songs: the Beatles were unique in this regard after the initial phase, when their early performances and records did include material by others. Something that is probably not well known that comes to light here is that ‘Indorock’ groups, formed by Indonesian immigrants to the Netherlands who frequented the Hamburg scene in 1960, were influential for the band.

Statistics abound throughout the book about the band’s superlative achievements from the beginning onwards. Their albums, for instance, held number one chart position for a total of forty weeks in 1964; ‘She Loves You’ (1963) became the biggest-selling single in UK history until 1977, when McCartney’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’ eclipsed it. (Sheila Whiteley provides amusing stats on truth embroidery in relation to drug ingestion, rock festival and love-in attendances, and meeting celebrities, with McCartney scoring most frequently the ‘famous-person-met’ porky.) The volume is rich in titillating moments: Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc’s chapter, for example, relates how George Harrison’s and John Lennon’s first LSD experience came about when their dinner host (a prominent London dentist) slipped the drug into their coffee; parts of the ensuing conversations from that night are captured in Lennon’s ‘She Said She Said’ (from Revolver, 1966). This chapter, building on Whiteley’s previous work on ‘psychedelic coding’, explores in gratifying depth the hallucinogen’s effects throughout the Beatles’ psychedelic phase – during which the authors claim the band ‘clearly peaked’ – in their music and lyrics, while also pointing to other contemporaneous bands’ engagement with psychedelia. Even though the Beatles were not the first rock group to put forward musical renditions of hallucinogenic antics, it was their lyrics on which acid godfather Timothy Leary’s High Priest (1968) chose to pun in his LSD experiences chronicles. The drug effects are palpably underlined in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, seminal to the psychedelic tracks that follow: ‘But listen to the colour of your dreams’, for instance. The description of the way the music amplifies this is compelling and informative: Ringo Starr’s inventive

stumbling march, providing a bit of temporal disruption, in which the first accent of each bar falls on the measure’s first beat and the second stress occurs in the second half of the measure’s third quarter, double sixteenth notes in stuttering preemption of the normal rhythmic emphasis on the second backbeat – hardly a classic rock and roll gesture.

Recording techniques here are also crucial: the singer’s vocals were piped through a Leslie speaker wired to a Hammond organ, creating a ‘resulting swirling’ that ‘creates a sense of distance that expands the vocal space of the track … Moreover, in the instrumental break we hear the first instance of backward recording.’ Lastly, McCartney’s Berio- and Stockhausen-inspired experimentalist dabbling brought to the track tape loops comprised of ‘five “little symphonies”’ created on his home Brennell tape machine, with the erase tape heads removed and thereby enabling the same tape to be recorded upon, over and over, and lending the song ‘its electronic density and otherworldly seagull cries, adding an acoustical surreality to the composition’; and also thereby, it might be stressed, dissolving the popular binary of Lennon-as-innovator/McCartney-as-mere-light-tunesmith. Social critique is also offered with the ‘absolute certainty expressed with rhetorical hyperbole [that] usually characterizes such songs’ in this subgenre: ‘“Rain” targets one of the most common subjects of psychedelic criticism: “squares” – those afraid of life and who, as a result, isolate themselves from authentic experience’; a critique of materialism is also a key factor in the ‘psychedelic vision of society’. The irony here that arises in ‘Taxman’, a lament on the high taxes placed on increasingly rich rock stars, is not lost on the authors.

Whiteley’s ‘The Beatles as Zeitgeist’ examines the band’s implications in 1960s social reforms, while Ian Inglis’s piece investigates the effects of 1968 on the group, the political and wider social upheavals conflating with the beginnings of the band’s own disintegration, the painful machinations of which are vividly portrayed in Steve Hamelman’s chapter. Inglis’s consideration also explores how postmodern aesthetics manifest in The Beatles (1968), aka the White Album, noting in particular the work’s aesthetic fragmentation, parody, irony, pastiche, self-conscious reflexivity and destabilisation of a central ‘meaning’. But the group’s earlier output also exhibited such ‘pomo’ (and ground-breaking) markers as crossing the high/low divide in their abovementioned embracing of contemporary ‘classical’ music/experimentalist tropes, and straddling musical cultures through Harrison’s incorporation of the sitar and other South Asian sounds.

The Companion is authored by fourteen males – including the editor – and only one female. Considering how much of Beatles’ songs’ subject matter is about women, and the high female representation in their fan base (certainly the most vocal at the early concerts!), I was interested to glean feminist readings of their work in this volume. James M. Decker’s contribution touches both on instances of misogyny and female agency in Rubber Soul (1965). Kimsey highlights the importance of Yoko Ono’s ‘tireless promotion of her late husband as champion of peace’. Whiteley examines ‘Eleanor Rigby’, persuasively suggesting that George Martin’s strings-only arrangement

gave [the song] a freshness of approach in terms of musical arrangement which was also appropriate to the mood of the lyrics, which, in turn, resonated with the experience of countless women who had neither family, friendship, nor support from that bastion of respectability, the established church. And this, surely, is why this is a political, cultural, and socially conscious song.

This also calls into question another common Beatles binary, this time with regard to that of the Stones being the ‘more political’ outfit, with their ‘Street Fighting Man’ (1968) written in direct protest at the Vietnam War, the Beatles representing ‘the philosophy of love that characterized hippy philosophy’. The politics embedded in ‘Eleanor Rigby’ are just as urgent, as Whiteley convincingly demonstrates in her account of the situation for women of the time.

Another fascinating gender-tinted nugget offered (by Laing) is that, as Paul McCartney acknowledges, ‘We were actually named after chicks’ – the name ‘Beatles’ was inspired by the film The Wild Ones, where the motorcycle gang’s girlfriends were called ‘beetles’ – ‘which I [McCartney] think is fabulous’.