The Beatles (White Album)

Recorded between May and October 1968, The Beatles (universally called The White Album) is the record made after the band's collective trip to Rishikesh to study Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Forty-eight songs were demoed at Harrison's Esher home in May 1968; thirty made the final running order. The sessions were the most fractious of the band's career: Ringo briefly quit (returning to find his drumkit covered in flowers), Geoff Emerick walked off, George Martin took an extended holiday mid-album, and Yoko Ono attended every session.

Most of the LP was cut at EMI on four-track until Trident Studios (Soho) was used for Hey Jude in late July, allowing the Beatles their first sessions on 8-track tape. EMI's own 8-track machine was finally installed in mid-September, while The White Album was being completed. The band frequently worked in three of the EMI studios in parallel, with each Beatle leading separate sessions: McCartney's Blackbird and Mother Nature's Son cut entirely solo; Lennon recording Revolution 9 with Ono and George Martin; Harrison's Long, Long, Long laid down with just Paul on bass.

Thirty tracks across four sides. Genres: Beach Boys pastiche (Back in the U.S.S.R.), nursery-rhyme menace (Cry Baby Cry), proto-metal (Helter Skelter, Yer Blues), old-time music-hall (Honey Pie, Martha My Dear), country-and-western parody (Rocky Raccoon), folk fingerpicking (Blackbird, Julia), avant-garde tape collage (Revolution 9), lullaby (Good Night). Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da was rerecorded so many times that Lennon eventually crashed in on piano in frustration to give it the riff that opens the released version. While My Guitar Gently Weeps brought Eric Clapton in to play lead — the first non-Beatle credited (or rather, deliberately uncredited) on a Beatles record.

Released 22 November 1968 in the famous embossed-white sleeve by Richard Hamilton, with serial-numbered first pressings. Eight weeks at UK number one. Sold three million copies in its first month in the US. Reviews were politely puzzled by the LP's deliberate stylistic incoherence — that incoherence being, of course, the point.

The White Album invented modern indie-pop's permission structure: a record is allowed to be a wardrobe of unrelated rooms, each track its own world. Lennon felt by 1970 that it was his favourite Beatles LP precisely because it was the four of them as four songwriters rather than as a band; McCartney later regretted that it could not have been edited into a single LP. The mono mix (UK only, PMC 7067/8) contains so many distinct edits, mixes and effects compared to its stereo counterpart that some collectors consider them effectively two different albums.