Beatles masterpieces remastered

Bookies are already predicting that John, Paul, George and Ringo will top the album charts once again with 'Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band' favourite to be the biggest seller, according to bookmaker William Hill. The next most fancied is 'Revolver', then 'Abbey Road'.

Online retailer Amazon.co.uk said a box set version of the band’s stereo albums - priced at £170 (€193) – topped its bestseller list on pre-orders alone.

It is thought to be the most expensive item ever to head the chart.

The sets are being issued in two versions – as well as the stereo mixes of each album, which are being sold boxed or individually, and a collector’s box of the band’s recordings in mono.

Experts have polished the sound and enhanced the quality of the original recordings which have been processed digitally.

It is the first time the releases have been tweaked since they were first issued on CD in 1987.

And with the increasing move to digital downloads for music sales – downloads now account for 98% of all singles sales – this may well be the last gasp for such a bold repackaging of a classic back catalogue.

The remasters are designed to appeal to not only those who want to upgrade their collections, but also potential younger fans whose interest has been sparked by classics from their parents’ – or grandparents’ – albums, or from bands who have name-dropped their influence.

Even music magazine NME, which is aimed at the younger end of the market, is being issued in 13 special Beatles-themed covers this week.

And to keep up with changing technological tastes, the band’s company Apple Corps has moved into the computer games market for the first time with the release of Beatles Rock Band.

But Paul McCartney revealed he has still not played and fears he would be hopeless.

In an interview with today’s NME, McCartney admitted: “I haven’t tried it. When you go to a demo they play it and I go ’God, that looks hard’.”

McCartney said he understood that some purists might not see the point of allowing The Beatles music to be used in the game but thought it would encourage younger fans.

“I started noticing lots of young kids were playing it, and for me the most interesting thing is that it will introduce Beatles music to people who might never have heard it because they game all the time, they don’t listen to the radio, they haven’t got much of a record collection,” he said.

One area which the band is still to enter is the download market. Despite ongoing discussions with computer giant Apple, The Beatles’ music is still not available to buy from iTunes which means fans will have to buy the albums, rather than buy songs on a track-by-track basis.

However internet rumours continue to circulate that a deal will soon be completed.

Here is an overview of each remastered album:

:: Please Please Me – “ah, one, two, three, farrrr ...” counts Paul McCartney as the band open their first album with I Saw Her Standing There in 1963. Much of the album was recorded in one day and it was largely the live act of the time. Twist And Shout was left to the end of the session because of the throat-shredding effect it had on Lennon’s voice. It featured the famed cover shot of the band looking down from a balcony at EMI’s Manchester Square offices in London (recreated in 1969).

:: With The Beatles – Recorded just four months after their debut and featuring George Harrison’s first composition (Don’t Bother Me), With The Beatles contained six covers and standards, like its predecessor. Included is the track I Wanna Be Your Man, which Lennon and McCartney first wrote and donated to the Rolling Stones.

:: A Hard Day’s Night – The first album written entirely by Lennon and McCartney and featuring 12-string guitars and acoustics to enrich the sound. Written as the soundtrack to a Dick Lester-directed film of the same name, with the title coming from a “Ringo-ism”.

:: Beatles For Sale – By now the band’s lives were increasingly hectic, with touring, filming, travelling and recording – and such was the pressure that work began on this album just six days after the final session for A Hard Day’s Night. As such, the band were again relying on a number of covers with Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly tracks included. They were as worn out as they look on the Hyde Park cover shot.

:: Help! – Soundtrack to the second Beatles film with seven of the tracks used in the completed caper. Among the notable tracks are Ticket To Ride and You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, as well as Yesterday which featured only one Beatle, Paul McCartney, plus a string quartet. Although the cover concept was to spell HELP in semaphore, it was thought the arm positions did not look good enough so the album actually spells NUJV.

:: Rubber Soul – The album which many see as the beginning of the ’interesting Beatles’, as the band play with new sounds. Norwegian Wood saw George Harrison tinkering with a sitar, while If I Needed Someone features a Byrds-y jangle and was one of a number of tracks with a country-rock feel. The cover also shows how the band were embracing psychedelia with the bubble writing and stretched photo giving a mind-expanding feel.

:: Revolver – Often seen as a contender for the band’s greatest album. After a much-needed break from constant demands, The Beatles were in full experimental flow. Song structures were becoming stranger and stranger, nowhere more so than on Tomorrow Never Knows with its thudding rhythm, backwards tape effects and total disregard for the verse-chorus approach. She Said She Said was based on an LSD trip the band took with actor Peter Fonda. Elsewhere, opening track Taxman was George Harrison’s response to the band finding themselves in the ’supertax’ bracket.

:: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – Probably the defining album of 1967, recorded after the band had quit touring and had begun their ’studio years’. With a lavish cover masterminded by pop artist Peter Blake, for which he was only ever paid about £200, the band had a loose concept about the titular group although this is not reflected in many of the songs. The band spent more than four months in Abbey Road working on the tracks, ranging from the touching She’s Leaving Home to Harrison’s sitar-drenched Within You Without You. The highpoint is A Day In The Life – essentially a Lennon song welded to a McCartney song with an incredible George Martin-scored orchestral build – and with one of the most famous final chords of all time.

:: Magical Mystery Tour – Originally a two-disc EP to accompany a BBC Christmas special, with just six songs, about a bus adventure with a nod to Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters; it was later expanded to an album in 1976 with added tracks from the same period which were not on albums, such as Hello Goodbye, Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane. Lennon’s Lear-inspired nonsense song I Am The Walrus later became a live fixture at Oasis’s gigs.

:: The Beatles – commonly referred to as ’The White Album’ due to the plain sleeve, the album captures not only a prolific period of song-writing as the band decamped to Rishikesh, India, but also a troubled few months as tensions within the band boiled over. Ringo Starr quit for a while leaving Paul to drum on some tracks including Back In The USSR. Across a double album, it contains the broadest stylistic range of any Beatles recording including the proto-heavy metal of Helter Skelter and pastiches such as Piggies and sound collage of Revolution 9. While My Guitar Gently Weeps also broke new ground by introducing a featured soloist on to their recordings with Eric Clapton playing lead guitar.

:: Yellow Submarine – Another soundtrack, this time to the animated movie which, although nominally starring the band, was voiced by actors (including former Coronation Street actor Geoffrey Hughes). Some songs had been released before including the title track, while others such as Only A Northern Song and Hey Bulldog were heard for the first time. The album’s second side was an orchestral score composed by producer George Martin.

:: Abbey Road – The last album recorded by the band, but due to the band’s release schedule, not the last to be issued. Contains Harrison’s masterful love song Something, as well as one of the least popular Beatles songs Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. The second side contains a 16-minute medley of song fragments which were pieced together culminating with The End, which was prophetically the last song recorded by all four Beatles. The famed cover features the band walking across the zebra crossing outside the Abbey Road studios.

:: Let It Be – After the squabbles and brief departures of The White Album, The Beatles wanted to make a back-to-basics album, Get Back, where they would rehearse and record together in early 1969. But creative tensions meant the original plan was abandoned and they moved from Twickenham Studios to their own Apple studios to finish recordings. Scheduling conflicts pushed the release into 1970 and the tapes were then given to producer Phil Spector to finish. The album did not appear until May 1970, by which point the band had split. It included One After 909, a song which had been kicking around since the early 1960s, as well as two of McCartney’s most anthemic tracks Let It Be and The Long And Winding Road (although he was never happy with the over-indulgent treatment Spector gave them and erased the producer’s efforts for a new version Let It Be ... Naked in 2003).

:: Past Masters – A compilation of the band’s singles (a-sides and b-sides) and alternate version which had not already been featured on albums, put together to allow fans to have an overview of almost the entire Beatles’ catalogue. The new CD version is a double album bringing together the albums which were previously released in two volumes.