Revolver

Recorded April to June 1966 in roughly 300 studio hours — three to four times the time taken for Rubber Soul — Revolver is the first LP made by a band who had decided they were finished with touring before they actually were. The technical revolution at EMI Studios that spring (Geoff Emerick's promotion to engineer, the casual deployment of close-miking, varispeed, ADT, tape loops, backwards recording) made the album effectively impossible to reproduce on stage. The band would tour for six more weeks in summer 1966 and never play any of these songs to a paying audience.

Geoff Emerick took over from Norman Smith and immediately violated EMI engineering protocols: close-miking Ringo's bass drum (Emerick stuffed it with a four-jumper-and-tea-towel pillow), running John's vocal through a rotating Leslie speaker on Tomorrow Never Knows, and feeding tape loops into the mix from five separate tape machines (one per studio, two operators per machine, fingers on the spools to maintain pitch). Paul's bass was recorded direct-injected for the first time, giving Paperback Writer its bass-as-melodic-instrument prominence.

Tomorrow Never Knows rebuilt pop from first principles: one chord (C), tape-loop drones, loops of laughter and orchestra and seagull-mouth-organ, and a vocal mantra adapted from The Tibetan Book of the Dead — recorded in a single afternoon, 6 April 1966. Eleanor Rigby contains no Beatle playing any instrument: McCartney sings to a string octet arranged by Martin in an explicit Bernard Herrmann tribute. Yellow Submarine, Got to Get You into My Life and Good Day Sunshine are pop concessions. Taxman opens the LP with a barbed George Harrison protest at supertax.

Released 5 August 1966 — exactly a year after Help! — alongside the Yellow Submarine / Eleanor Rigby double A-side. UK number one for seven weeks. Klaus Voormann's ink-and-photograph cover, drawn while the band were recording, won a Grammy in 1967 for Best Album Cover.

Revolver is routinely cited in critical polls as the band's finest LP. Its real significance is that it ended the live-music era of The Beatles: the songs are arrangements that could only exist on tape. Within four months of its release, the band had played their last paying concert at Candlestick Park, and the second half of their career — the studio half — could begin.