A perfect album closer, and in terms of studio experimentation and the avant garde, surpassed anything Lennon did on Sgt. This track still sounds unbelievable today, so I’d love to have been there when people first played this 50 years ago. Although I love the album version, I also rate the Anthology / Real Love CD single outtake/remix, which has a single tracked vocal and brings in the harmonies at the end. If anyone ever doubted his talent, the sheer craft and skill with melody and lyric is something to behold. Paul often cites this as his best, or one of his best, songs. At this stage I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth around that. John said (rather grumpily) in an interview that he helped George a great deal with this track even though he wasn’t credited. That bass line, that guitar solo are both Paul, but the lyric is pithy George at his best. For me this song, more than any other defines Revolver. The first track on the album (not if you bought the cassette tape in the 1970s, that reordered the album and stared with Good Day Sunshine) and apparently the first Beatles lyric not concerned with that thing called lurrvve. It extends the track to nine minutes and George Martin is at the helm again. If you want ‘more’ of Eleanor Rigby then try (a-hem) Eleanor Rigby/Eleanor’s Dream from Paul’s 1984 soundtrack Give My Regards to Broadstreet. “Father McKenzie” was going to be Father McCartney, but Paul considered that a little too close to home. George Martin’s superb string arrangement keeps the pace up and the momentum driving forward. The ‘chorus’ is “all the lonely people…” but then there’s the refrain of “ahh, look at all the lonely people” at 1.19 which has a completely different melody and Paul later uses as a counter-melody at around 1.50. Great lyric, great drama and great pathos. Brilliant lyric, backwards guitar, some nice bits of Paul vocal harmony (“keeping an eye on the world GOING BY MY WINDOW”), those spaces where the bass goes “bom, bom, bom, bom” and the eastern influenced outro. My favourite song the album, has that weirdness that distinguishes Revolver from Rubber Soul. So let’s examine what is one of the best albums in the world and, for fun, SDE will go through the tracks on Revolver and rank them from best to worst… Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as the critics’, and perhaps the fans’, favourite Beatles album. It’s 50 years old TODAY and I think it’s fair to say that over recent years and decades The Beatles‘ seventh studio album Revolver, with its monochrome Klaus Voorman designed cover, has overtaken the colourful and psychedelic Sgt.
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