There was reason to fear that the much-anticipated remastering of The Beatles' CDs, the first upgrade since the initial CD release in 1987, would take perhaps the most beloved and familiar pop music of the past century and render it so sonically perfect and smoothed out that it would appear untouched by human hands. But the remastering is everything we could have hoped for. Apple Corps Ltd and EMI have released stereo mixes of the original English configurations of the dozen Beatles LPs, plus the American version of Magical Mystery Tour (released in the UK as a double EP) and Past Masters, the collection of non-album singles (now in a single two-disc package). These can be purchased individually with a short documentary on each disc for a limited time, or in a box set with the documentaries on an accompanying DVD. In addition, there is a limited-edition run of 10,000 box sets called The Beatles in Mono containing the original mono mixes of the albums recorded that way (Please, Please Me through The Beatles (The White Album).
Your first question about the remasters is probably: how do they sound? And the answer is fantastic. Your second question is likely to be: What else is there to say about The Beatles? The answer, I think, is that while the work done by the engineers involved (Alan Rouse, Guy Massey, Steve Rooke, Paul Hicks, Sean Magee, Sam Okell and Simon Gibson) is a constant demonstration of the marvels possible with contemporary recording technology, the reissues are, in their way, a reminder of the limits of technology and as such a reaffirmation of the Beatles' career. Had the re-engineering airbrushed the original records into faceless perfection, it would have been a betrayal of a body of work that always used technology in the service of the music.
Consider this: in a recent documentary on his life and work, the great American producer and engineer Tom Dowd recounts a trip to Britain in the mid-1960s where he was appalled to discover that, while he was using eight-track machines to record Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding and others in America, most British artists were still recording on two- and three-track machines. The four-track machine The Beatles were using at the EMI studios on Abbey Road was probably the most advanced in the country.
And yet think of the wonders that the producer George Martin (around the time of Revolver in 1966 joined by the then 20-year-old engineer Geoff Emerick) was coming up with while serving as the translator for the group's musical ideas. It was Martin who spliced together two different speed demos of John Lennon's vocal on Strawberry Fields Forever to create the voice that makes the song the most melancholy and mysterious of fairy tales. It was Martin, in the aural equivalent of William Burroughs' cut-up technique of writing, who chopped the calliope in Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite into dozens of pieces of tape, tossed them in the air and then reassembled them at random. To John Lennon's request for 10,000 chanting Tibetan monks to accompany Tomorrow Never Knows Martin created the otherworldly dirge noises of that track by pressing the heads of a tape recorder against the tape going through it to create a sound like string instruments emitting unearthly shrieks.
Each of these bits of invention, and countless others, are handmade solutions to technical problems. The Beatles played their last public concert in August of 1966. After that, they were purely a studio group. And yet, like another musician, Glenn Gould, who chose not to play outside the studio only two years before, The Beatles were never swallowed by the technology they chose. Gould hummed along with his pieces, his beaten-up chair squeaking as he moved around, disarmingly human touches in the midst of the technical perfection he sought. For The Beatles, the equivalent for songs as varied as Eleanor Rigby, I'm Only Sleeping, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, Strawberry Fields Forever, might be Joseph Cornell's shadow boxes, works in which the most mundane objects and images lurk in the dark corners, stand in juxtapositions that seem to have come about by dream logic, beckon you into shadows that seem at once baroque and new. The Beatles gave Coleridgean visions the familiar touchstones of childhood memories, children's paintings and Edwardian circus posters. Like the paintings that stretch and open to entice onlookers into them in Dario Argento's unearthly beautiful horror film The Stendahl Syndrome, The Beatles, in their baroque-psychedelic period, entice us into their created worlds.
The remasterings of their work would have been a disaster if the engineers had clarified everything to the point where the songs deteriorated into bits. The triumph of the remasters is that the recordings retain their wholeness and have taken on an enormous presence. To listen to the songs now is to enter into them, to feel that you are in their midst as they are being played. Strings and horns are dramatically present, especially the saxes on Got to Get You Into My Life and Alan Civil's exquisite English horn solo on For No One (perhaps Paul McCartney's greatest song). McCartney sounds as if he's delivering his vocals from a distance no further away than your speaker. George Harrison's guitar work may finally be recognised for the slashing fire he was capable of, and Ringo Starr's drumming, as with Gould's humming, makes you feel as if you can perceive the dimensions of the Abbey Road studio itself. If I Fell, from A Hard Day's Night, becomes the aural equivalent of the way the director Richard Lester shot The Beatles in that film. We feel close enough to see the slight sheen on sweat on their faces, feel we are privy to the nods and smiles passed between them.
Where the remastering cannot create a feeling of closeness is, unsurprisingly, in Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and that's for the best, because the record - a shallow masterpiece, to borrow the term Pauline Kael used to describe Citizen Kane - has always depended for its impact on a sense of distance in order to maintain its artifice. And something of the same thing happens on Abbey Road, the last-stand album undertaken to erase the shambles of Let It Be. Nothing can crack the album's brittle veneer of professionalism, the fragments that, for all the studio trickery, do not quite become songs or a larger whole.
If the remastering obviously benefits from the studio trickery that went into the later recordings, it does no less for the moments of sheer sonic and emotional exhilaration. The chiming guitars of And Your Bird Can Sing (one of the peaks of The Beatles' music) are sublime and A Hard Days' Night and She Loves You, perhaps the most purely joyous rock 'n' roll song of all time, hit with the surging physicality that has always made you feel as if you were being lifted out of your body from sheer, unreasonable happiness.
From I Want to Hold Your Hand to quotations from the Tibetan Book of the Dead in Tomorrow Never Knows is two scant years. To be caught up in the excitement generated by The Beatles, a time when albums were separated by four months, was to feel possibilities opening up. What The Beatles offer now is not just the reassurance of the familiar, an insulting way to turn artists into security blankets. The doors that open in these remasterings are not doors to the past but doors to the future.
