Revolver at Sixty or how I grew to love The Beatles

Carnaby Street-ish 1966

It hit me, coming into 2026 while listening to “Sgt. Pepper’s” that my favourite Beatle album, “Revolver” released in August 1966, will soon be sixty years old.

Sixty. Can you believe it?

The number sixty seemed to be suddenly significant to me. Back when I was a kid, people of sixty years old were officially REALLY OLD! And now, “When I’m Sixty Four” has already passed me by.

The album cover that didn't make it into print?

I’ve been playing Beatles music in one form or another since I was fourteen, studying the easy piano and guitar edition (before I could play guitar) of The Beatles Complete songbook (which some of you may remember came out in the early 70’s). Along with its classic tunes it has some ‘suggestive’, risqué artwork and photos within it’s pages, something of which my parents certainly did not approve and threatened to tear out the offending images. At that time I was learning classical piano and not too successfully. My parents permitted me to use The Beatles songbook as a kind of light relief from the difficult piano ‘études’ I was working my way through (but not the kind of relief I might have obtained from the 'offending' pages I hasten to add) - so long as I did my lessons practice.

I was however, a square peg being hammered into a round hole.

In our house, back in the early seventies, we’d had no record player since our old gramophone had packed in sometime in the mid-sixties. Therefore the only sources of music were the radio, or ‘wireless’ as it used to be called back in the day, and the Black-and-White TV. And my mother, God rest her soul, strictly controlled both of these pieces of equipment. Pop and rock music of the time was not permitted in our house. The BBC’s Top Of The Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test were banned. That kind of music would lead to subversion which would lead to ‘free love’ as casual sex was once known and of course would lead to the Road to Hell long before Chris Rea had even picked up a guitar.

What's that thing, Granddad?

However, as Christmas of ’74 approached I had a stroke of luck. Cassette recorders were the next big thing in ’74 and every kid wanted one. An aunt bought me a record token (remember them?) which couldn’t be exchanged at the shop for anything else. My mother was adamant that we weren’t going to have another record player in the house. However, I hankered after a cassette recorder and a week later my mother’s aunt, in a very magnanimous gesture gave me enough money to be able to buy three cassette recorders. As the cassette recorder was smaller, quieter, cheaper, simpler, more compact than a record player and the albums sold as ‘music-cassettes’ couldn’t be scratched I sold all these concepts to my mother with the promise that I could record classical music by tuning into BBC Radio 3 on the 'wireless' and using the little cheap microphone that came with the recorder, record and listen to it at my leisure - at a low volume - in my own bedroom.

My first purchase on cassette was Mike Oldfield’s debut album, Tubular Bells. I bought this as I thought I’d get less aggravation from my mother by buying a pop instrumental album. She didn’t like it. My second purchase was Elton John’s Greatest Hits, with me telling my mother what a great piano player he was. She didn’t like that album either! “What’s he singing? I can’t understand a single word he’s singing!” A viewpoint undertaken by many to this day, great and all as he was.

And so those two albums were all I had to play on my cassette recorder until the Easter break from school in March ’75. I was fourteen years old.

Nope, that cover didn't make it either!

An enterprising kid in my class was fortunate in having hundreds of albums and he operated a loan system at school, renting out his records with a deposit charging full price if they came back scratched (in short order he became a multi-millionaire financier, unsurprisingly). He loaned out cassettes with no deposit - his logic at the time was that you couldn’t damage a cassette - and he loaned me The Beatles 1962-1966 compilation. I came back home with that tape on the last day of school before the Easter holidays with an unexplainable feeling that everything was going to be different from then on. At least musically.

As I played the cassette that afternoon, my mother seemed to like some of the music on that Beatles 1962-1966 album, particularly ‘Yesterday’, not because they were incredibly well-written and sounded great but because, somewhat nostalgically, the music made her remember me as a three-year-old dancing to The Beatles on our black-and-white TV and watching me strumming my little plastic toy guitar in time to “She Loves You” and “A Hard Days Night” (I still to this day play a version of “A Hard Days Night” on stage, only my version’s jazz-ish in the style of Tom Waits).

Looking back on that particular day in March 1975, coming home with that Beatles cassette in my hand, that was the day my life in music really started. All kinds of it.

Later in the year when I turned fifteen, I got myself a Saturday-job. And after that it was only a few short weeks until I had The Beatles 1967-1970 compilation, then Sgt. Pepper’s, Let it Be, Abbey Road and ….. Revolver.

“Revolver" might have been all of nine years old when I first bought the album but the songs on it talked to me like no other. It was the Beatles album for me that contained the best songs - more like The Beatles as I‘d grown to love them but with an edgier approach indicating a change in direction. Songs like “Taxman” (which in ’81, The Jam would rip-off and call it “Start”), “Got To Get You Into My Life”, covered by many, “And Your Bird Can Sing”, the first time the Fab Four had used double-tracked lead guitar, the McCartney ballad “Here There And Everywhere” which Lennon said was the finest song he ever wrote, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, their genre-busting clarion call of their new direction paving the way for Sgt. Pepper.

A couple of years after I made that purchase, punk and New Wave hit the streets. I could hear the ‘Revolver’ influences in some of the New Wave songs of the late 70’s. Fast-forward to today it’s an album, sixty years after its creation that I still listen to. The only difference? It’s on my iPhone these days. Although I still have it on cassette, vinyl and CD as well.

Who's driving? Or is it diving?

The Beatles have been a huge part of my life and actually continue to be. I even have a model Yellow Submarine adorning my studio! I think their music will eventually become revered by all discerning musicians in the way that the music of Bach and Mozart are revered.

And what of “Revolver” now, sixty years (almost) after it first appeared? Will there be a sixtieth anniversary edition? Unlikely as there was a remix version released in 2022 as well as a 'super deluxe' edition of multiple takes as well as the entire mono mix of the album and the two tracks original left off the album, the single “Paperback Writer” and it’s B-side “Rain” which I always thought would have fitted so well into that album from the get go. But back then, it wasn’t considered proper to release a single from an album. Singles had to be separately released to be fair on the buying public. How things have changed!

It’s an odd feeling to finally admit to oneself that one is REALLY OLD and knowing that my childhood influencers (to use modern parlance), The Beatles - an entity, a philosophy even, serendipitous, a sum much greater than its component parts - will long outlast me and what they produced with their superlative talent will entertain generations for centuries to come. They may have been of their time but they're also for all time. I hope.