Rubber Soul

Recorded in just over four weeks between mid-October and mid-November 1965 — by the band's own subsequent admission, a deadline-driven sprint to make Christmas — Rubber Soul is the pivot. The Beatles had spent the summer of 1965 reading Dylan, ingesting cannabis and (in Lennon and Harrison's case) experimenting with LSD. The LP that emerged was their first to be conceived as an album, not a sequence of singles plus filler. McCartney later said it was the moment 'we got bored with being The Beatles.'

Norman Smith's last LP as the band's engineer (he was about to be promoted to producer at EMI, where one of his first signings would be Pink Floyd). The four-track Studer J37 was now being pushed to its limits with multiple bounced reductions. New instrumental colours appeared everywhere: George's sitar (acquired during the Help! film shoot) on Norwegian Wood; Paul's fuzz bass on Think for Yourself; harmonium on The Word; Mal Evans' single-note Hammond drone on You Won't See Me; the sped-up baroque piano George Martin played on In My Life that listeners always assume is a harpsichord.

Norwegian Wood opens with the first sitar in Western pop and tells a cryptic story of an affair that ends, possibly, in arson. Drive My Car opens the LP with a bass-line lifted from Otis Redding's Respect. In My Life condenses an entire neighbourhood memoir (originally a literal list of Liverpool places) into two-and-a-half minutes. Michelle smuggled in French-language pop. The Word turned 'love' into doctrine, anticipating All You Need Is Love eighteen months later.

Released 3 December 1965 — the same day as the Day Tripper / We Can Work It Out double A-side single. Eight weeks at UK number one. The cover photo's stretched perspective happened by accident when designer Robert Freeman dropped his slide-projector to one side. The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson heard Rubber Soul, was floored, and set out to make the LP that became Pet Sounds — which in turn drove The Beatles to make Revolver.

Rubber Soul is the first Beatles LP that signals the band's adult creative ambitions in every parameter at once: subject matter (interior monologue, marital cynicism, philosophical exhortation), instrumentation (sitar, fuzz, harmonium, baroque piano), arrangement (no covers, no novelty tracks, no obvious singles) and packaging (no band name on the cover). After it, every serious pop LP began conceiving itself as a unified artistic statement.