THE ROAD TO THE REVOLVER (2022): Say you want a reinvention . . .

It's entirely possible that less than a year before they released Revolver, the album many consider a more enduring landmark album than Sgt. Pepper which followed it, the Beatles might simply have called it all off.

Exactly a year before Revolver they had released the Help! album to coincide with their knockabout film of the same name – a kind of James Bond spoof as much as a Beatles showcase – and Lennon was signaling how trapped he felt.

The fame he'd so desperately sought had been found wanting and Beatlemania was oppressive: “And now my life had changed in oh so many ways, my independence seems to vanish in the haze . . . help me if you can I'm feeling down”.

Harrison too was restless and embarking on a musical and spiritual quest prompted by his discovery of Indian music, and McCartney had stepped out solo with Yesterday. Even though it was credit to Lennon-McCartney as always and he was the only Beatle playing on it.

Help! was a passable Beatle album then there was a tour where once again they couldn't hear themselves over the screaming and Beatlemania meant a car or van to and from hotel rooms, the stage and the airport.

If they'd called it off then out of sheer exhaustion – five albums, two movies, hundreds of live shows and radio appearances in just three years – we would remember them for great pop songs, the cultural phenomenon of Beatlemania and the film A Hard Day's Night.

But something happened, aside from marijuana.

Always competitive, they responded to others upping their game: great songs from the Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, Byrds, Kinks, Who and many others.

So they got serious and at the end of 1965 delivered Rubber Soul which showed a band capable of great invention.

Lennon realised the artist could be the subject of the art in songs like In My Life and Nowhere Man, Harrison brought in the unusual sound of the sitar on Lennon's Dylanesque folk of Norwegian Wood, McCartney turned up with tough rock (Drive My Car), a pretty ballad (Michelle) and country (I'm Looking Through You).

Harrison had two of his songs (Think For Yourself, If I Needed Someone) in the mix.

In retrospect though Rubber Soul was just the runway for a band that got lift-off with the terrific Revolver eight months later.

Revolver is the last great guitar band album by the Beatles, the album where the three increasingly different songwriters went their own ways but the others went with them without some of the rancor which would follow within two years.

Revolver was still, for the most part, four men recording live in a studio making music together, most often in a huddle.

As Giles Martin, who has now delivered the remixed edition of Revolver (with dozens of demos and outtakes in the super deluxe expanded edition, notes, “[Revolver] is an album of everyone's acceptance and everyone's ideas”.

Here we pick out a selection of those Revolver demos and different takes to show what Harrison called “a little dance-hall band” changing the face of popular music and elevating the three minute pop song into an art form.

After Revolver, popular music was never -- and needn't have been -- the same again.

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Yellow Submarine from Lennon's early demo to a run-through then take before the sound effects, finaly highlighted sound effect.

Lennon's demo for She Said She Said then a backing take

 

Tomorrow Never Knows, take 1

 

Got To Get You Into My Life, first version

 

Love You To, first take, a rehearsal of Harrison's sitar part then take 7

 

Rain (along with Paperback Writer recorded during the same sessions but released months earlier than Revolver). First take at actual speed, then heard slowed down for the finished version

And Your Bird Can Sing, early versions