With only acoustic guitars, the songs they wrote there, perhaps out of necessity, took on a folkish quality. The Himalayan outing had an audible effect on the music. The Beatles had spent the early months of 1968 in the foothills of the Himalayas, studying mediation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. There’s a 3-disc version, which gives you the original 30-song album in its bright new mixes, plus one extra disc of recordings made in May 1968 at George Harrison’s house in Esher, and these raw, all-acoustic performances are revealing in their own ways. The Beatles: the 50th anniversary deluxe box set Photo: supplied But it might feel as though you’ve had your ears freshly syringed. Unless for some reason you have never heard this record before, it won’t sound unfamiliar. You could even argue that he has at last brought into being what the Beatles were striving for at the time. Taking those original mixes as his templates, Martin has used today’s technology to sharpen or more clearly define those textures.

Back in 68, the Beatles were pushing the technology to its limits to create the unorthodox textures they were after. In fact, listening to Martin’s 2018 mixes you could be excused for thinking nothing had been done at all.īut play it side-by-side with, say, the original vinyl and you will hear what Martin has done. Now, this isn’t a remix in the urban dance sense, where the original recording is essentially the raw material for a new piece of music. The 2009 edition had been re mastered, but this one has been re mixed, by a small army of engineers overseen by Giles Martin, whose father the late George Martin produced the original record. Well, for one thing it does sound really good.

It’s 50 years this week since the release of The Beatles, or the White Album as it has come to be known, and the Beatle machine hasn’t missed the opportunity to sell those half-century-old sounds all over again.īut if you first bought this iconic double album in 1968, or in 1987 when it was issued for the first time on CD, or in any of the further iterations that have come out since then, has this latest version got anything new to offer?

My guitar gently weeps original