A friend and fellow-musician-blogger-songwriter recently forwarded me veteran music journalist Bill Wyman’s exhaustive 2017 ranking of all 213 Beatles songs. I was incensed. How dare anyone rank The Great Unrankable? The Beatles’ music is unassailably off-limits to mere music writers. Everybody knows that. Predictably, Bill Wyman (no relation to The Rolling Stones’ original bass-player, although that would have been an interesting article) got it hopelessly wrong. Well, mostly wrong. Ok, he made some interesting points. Ok fine, the Herculean effort it took to rank the work of the best band in the History Of All Bands is admirable. There, I admitted it.

Opinions on art are, at the best of times, dangerously subjective things. Vast swathes of modern pop music audiences, for example, genuinely like Ed Sheeran. There’s no accounting for taste, as it says in the Bible. Still, in the case of a handful of artists, there are obvious works of genius. Elvis was an unrepeatable one-off. So were Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chuck Berry. The Matrix. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. Monty Python’s Oscar Wilde sketch. Billy Collins poems. The Goon Show. The Birth of Venus. Anything by Richard Brautigan. Anything, literally anything, by Michelangelo. And, of course, The Beatles.

I’m going to attempt a piece soon in which I will successfully argue that The Rolling Stones, while capable of great moments, were the first Every-band, and that The Beatles stood apart and exempt from all classification when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll. The piece you are reading now is a response to Bill Wyman’s rankling ranking and the subsequent query from the friend who alerted me to it in the first place. He grudgingly acknowledged the rightness of my contention that Wyman had hopelessly failed, but praised the effort it had taken to produce such a list. Which I had to grudgingly acknowledge. He appreciated (and I quote) “how [Wyman] eviscerates as often as he praises”. Fair enough. You can read Wyman’s piece yourself and make up your own mind. You will, of course, be wrong too.

Everyone who knows me knows my love of The Beatles. “Love” isn’t the right word. “Slavish devotion”, maybe. I’ve read everything written about The Beatles, I own all the recordings in all formats, all the books, all the DVDs and Blu-Ray reissues. To say I am a devotee is putting it mildly. So when my friend, in response to my outrage at Wyman’s cheek, asked me to list my top five Beatles songs, I replied, “Easy! It’s She Loves You, It Won’t Be Long, Misery…no wait, that should read Hold Me Tight, It’s Only Love, Run For Your Life… no, hang on, You Can’t Do That…”

Not as straight-forward as I thought. They’re all great, all 213 of them, even the German-language re-recordings of I Want To Hold Your Hand (Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand) and She Loves You (Sie Liebt Dich). Even slight oddities like Wild Honey Pie and Dig It. And yes, even the much-maligned Revolution #9 (which Bill Wyman mistakenly ranks 114 out of 213, when everybody knows it’s 9). Ranking beloved songs is, like love, a losing game. The best I could manage were my favourite five, the five Beatle songs that continue to surprise, excite and offer me something new, even after decades of listening to them. The sheer exhiliration of She Loves You is unparalleled in recorded music history, I’m not denying that I can still hear that on the record, but it is these five songs that I, as the only Beatle fan in the world with a valid opinion, keep coming back to. In no particular order, of course.

Rain

Considered by most to be the Beatles’ finest b-side, John Lennon’s Rain backed Paul McCartney’s Paperback Writer single in mid-1966, and was one of the earliest portents of things to come. Recorded during the sessions for what came to be the Revolver album, Rain featured some of the most daring studio experimenting to date: a slowed-down, ominous rhythm track, turgid guitars and a backwards vocal from stoned-out-of-his-mind John. Most of all, Rain features a bravura drumming performance from Ringo Starr. One of the High Priests of Beatles Lore is Ian MacDonald who, in his seminal Revolution In The Head (1994), singles out Ringo’s drumming as ‘so inventive that it threatens to overwhelm the track’. Ringo apparently agreed. The song is daring, mysterious, bold and inscrutable. It’s also just plain odd, especially coming from the band who, just over month after achieving this, would record Yellow Submarine.

Strawberry Fields Forever

The creation of this John Lennon song is almost as famous as the song itself. Ian MacDonald’s book, apart from Mark Lewisohn’s unparalleled documentations of its genesis, is an excellent guide. Suffice it to say, there’s enough mystery and sonic fairy-dust on this recording to captivate the listener for, well, ever. I must have first heard this during those heady months when my dad introduced me to his Beatles LPs, in 1983. At that point, Strawberry Fields Forever was only 16 years old. I was only 11. Thirty-seven years later, this masterpiece of sonic invention has not lost an ounce of whatever it has that makes it so continually beguiling. Have you noticed it has no bass guitar on it? Does the unnerving return of the maelstrom from oblivion at 3:37 still surprise you? Does John’s cryptic “cranberry sauce” muttering in the final dying seconds not raise the hair on your neck? Unprecedented in 1967, Strawberry Fields Forever will forever be a pivotal moment in 20th century popular art.

She Said She Said

This is the last track of side one of the aforementioned Revolver album of 1966. According to Lore, it was the last song recorded for the album and possibly the only Beatles band recording not to have Paul McCartney on it. George Harrison played bass. This is an anguished existential John Lennon LSD song of note, inspired by enthusiastic hyperbole from an equally acid-fried Peter Fonda during the band’s 1965 US tour. I agree with Ian MacDonald, there is something even more captivating about Ringo’s drumming on this song than on Rain, recorded two months earlier. 1966/67 was undoubtedly Ringo’s time to remind people why he was even in The Beatles in the first place, if anybody was still wondering. She Said She Said is angsty, tormented, edgy, followed on Revolver by Bill Wyman’s worst Beatles song of all, Good Day Sunshine. I hate to admit it, but I possibly agree with him there. Incidentally, Wyman ranks She Said She Said number 11 out of 213, which redeems him somewhat. But not much.

I Am The Walrus

This, I agree, is John Lennon’s final Beatles masterpiece. It should have been an album all on its own. Instead, after a band fight, it was relegated to the b-side of Paul’s cheery Hello Goodbye (1967). I Am The Walrus is the moodiest, sneeringest, trippiest, most ominously broody thing ever. Apart from the other songs on my list, that is. It’s John at his Lewis Carroll-best: “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together/ See how they run like pigs from a gun/ See how they fly/ I’m crying”. It also features his greatest recorded vocal performance. So original, so iconic, that even John himself referred to it in another Beatles song a year later (Glass Onion from 1968’s White Album). I apologise, but I must quote Ian MacDonald again, who notes that John’s chord sequence for I Am The Walrus is “the most unorthodox and tonally ambiguous sequence he ever devised… a perpetually ascending/ descending MC Escher staircase of all the natural major chords”. If that doesn’t have you scrambling for your Beatles playlist then I give up. This is the only Beatles song those famous Beatles-clones Oasis ever officially covered. Three decades after first hearing I Am The Walrus, I still am utterly entranced by it.

Tomorrow Never Knows

At a not-too-hard push, I’d say that this is my favourite Beatles song. Which is odd, I know; it’s hardly really a ‘song’, more of a tone-poem. But then again, my favourite U2 song is Elvis Presley and America, so maybe I’m just deliberately obtuse. Regardless, Tomorrow Never Knows has everything: avant-garde recording approaches, the first-ever instance of backwards guitar, the best drum-bass guitar backing track ever, tape loops and, if that’s not enough, lyrics from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. What more could you want from a songwriter (John, again) who only six short months previously had been singing “you better run for your life if you can, little girl” for all he was worth? Every single time I hear that opening sitar drone followed by the bludgeoning of Ringo’s crash cymbals, I get That Feeling: this is why I love music, and this is why The Beatles were/are the greatest thing of all time ever. It’s the sound of Tomorrow Never Knows, lyrics and studio experimentation aside, that lifts me. Various Beatles songs do various things to me; if Hey Jude doesn’t make you glad you’re alive you’re just not listening properly. Ditto for Drive My Car or Helter Skelter. But Tomorrow Never Knows has, for this Beatles fan, something transcendent, something other-worldly, something beyond mere bands and records and rock ‘n’ roll. Thirty-seven years on, I still can’t put my finger on it.

Post-script:

The above list reveals I’m partial to 1966-1967-era Beatles. I also apparently favour John Lennon. Everyone has their favourite Beatle, right? Some wag even has it that the members of the band are dying in the wrong order. As I’ve grown from that entranced 11-year-old into infinitely wise middle-age, I’m drawn more and more to George Harrison, but it’s undeniable in the end: The Beatles were John Lennon’s band. His was the band’s energy, ego, determination and sheer bloody-mindedness. If it hadn’t been for John, The Beatles may have been Paul McCartney’s quaint Your Mother Should Know mid-60s oddity. As twee as mid-60s BeeGees. It was John who brought Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields Forever, She Said She Said, Rain, I Am The Walrus to the world, along with Doctor Robert, A Day In The Life, Happiness Is A Warm Gun and I Want You (She’s So Heavy). That’s not just my opinion. I’m right. Ask any Beatles aficionado. Except Bill Wyman, of course.

Extra Reading:

There are many excellent Beatles books, and more than a few bad ones, but after reading virtually all of them, I highly recommend these:

Revolution In The Head – Ian MacDonald (1994)

Dreaming The Beatles – Rob Sheffield (2017)

One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time – Craig Brown (2020)

…and anything, literally anything, by Mark Lewisohn.

Oh yes, and the excellent beatlesbible.com.

Thanks for listening.