ON Wednesday, The Beatles' entire back catalogue will be re-released, having been digitally remastered and repackaged with new photos, liner notes and a spiffy doco on the making of each album.
On the same day a new game - Rock Band: The Beatles will be unveiled, allowing gamers everywhere to play like John, Paul, George and even Ringo.
Almost 40 years after their demise as a band, The Beatles still make the news and attract attention. The reason is simple - they are the greatest band that ever walked the earth.
If you've never understood why, here are the five essential Beatles albums that will help fill you in.
Rubber Soul (1965)
PRIOR to their sixth studio album, The Beatles were already the biggest band in the album and had written an enviable swag of the greatest pop songs ever committed to tape. But on Rubber Soul they grew up lyrically and began to change pop music by experimenting with new sounds. Norwegian Wood was their most poetically abstract song to date and one of the first pop tunes to feature sitar, while the nostalgic In My Life shines with newfound honesty and a charming sped-up piano solo from producer George Martin. Other highlights: the hippie-vibe of The Word, the jangly Nowhere Man and I'm Looking Through You, and the gentle Girl.
Revolver (1966)
AFTER the folk-pop leanings of Rubber Soul, The Beatles took their experiments further and helped defined the psychedelic era with Revolver, often regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time. Opening with Harrison's sarcastic rocker Taxman, the record shifts gears regularly - McCartney's sparse eulogy Eleanor Rigby is followed by the backwards guitars of Lennon's drowsy I'm Only Sleeping, while the childlike Yellow Submarine precedes the LSD-influenced She Said She Said. The album closes with what were the two most un-Beatles-like numbers at the time - the brassy Motown of Got To Get You Into My Life and the ahead-of-its-time mind-blower Tomorrow Never Knows.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
HAVING given up on touring, the Fab Four could focus on fulfilling their artistic vision in the studio, pushing themselves, the technology and their engineers to the limit. The result is a dazzling multi-coloured circus of rock'n'roll songs (the bookending title tracks), pop (Getting Better, With A Little Help From My Friends), Indian music (Within You, Without You), pyschedelia (Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite) and music hall (When I'm Sixty Four). The big finale, A Day In The Life, is a spiralling epic that remains one of their greatest achievements and caps off one of the most influential albums of all time.
The Beatles (aka The White Album) (1968)
AFTER the broad technicolour strokes of Sgt Pepper's, this self-titled double album is a mostly back-to-basics sprawl largely written while the band was meditating in India. The band was beginning to fall apart (Ringo quit at one point) but the results were still astonishing, from the gentle moments (Julia, Long, Long, Long, Mother Nature's Son) to the heavy dirty ones (Helter Skelter, Yer Blues). The White Album contains some of their best and most under-rated tunes, with each member pulling their weight - Dear Prudence, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Rocky Racoon, Glass Onion, Back In The USSR and Revolution 1 to name a few.
Abbey Road (1969)
HOPING to go out on a high, The Beatles shelved the fracturous Let It Be project and returned to Abbey Road studios for one last record. The band was rapidly disintegrating but managed to make one of their most solid albums. Side A leads with Lennon's groove Come Together and Harrison's finest hour Something and also features Ringo's finest moment Octopus' Garden, while Side B features a medley of finished and unfinished songs, wound together to make a unique 16-minutes of pop. The closer (if you don't count the accidental secret track) is, fittingly, The End where Ringo gets a drum solo, the other three trade guitar solos, and the whole thing finishes with the cosmically karmic line "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make''. A fitting endnote to an amazing career.
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