Happy 40th Birthday, Abbey Road!

The last few weeks have witnessed a deluge of Beatle related media interest, and little wonder given that Apple Corps, the company set up by the Beatles 1967, finally got around to digitally re-mastering the bands entire catalogue, and that the band themselves have become video game stars.
Surely, many people must be asking; “Won’t the Beatles just go away?” seemingly not.
In fact such has been the success of Apple Corps under the captain-ship of the late Neil Aspinall, these days ‘The Beatles’ are as much brand as they are band. However, before we close the Beatle scrapbook on a year which began with the 40th anniversary of the Apple rooftop gig, the last time the band performed together in public, there is one more anniversary of note; September 26th sees the 40th anniversary of the release of the Beatles last recorded studio album, Abbey Road.
The final Beatles album is a conundrum in itself. The album belies the relationships between the band members at the time; written and recorded amidst arguably popular music’s most bitter and vicious of divorce proceedings. How then, does the record look and sound so fresh and positive, so effervescent? The answer according to the legend is simple; the collective knowledge that this was the final curtain, allowed the band to put the daggers down and ‘get back’ to what they truly did best, making music. For a little while, business meetings, publishing squabbles, and managerial contracts were forgotten; no punches would be thrown at each other, or each others wives, and any bricks that would soon be thrown through each others living room windows were placed, temporarily, back into the boots of cars.
The recent 40th anniversary of Iain Macmillan’s famous photograph gracing the cover of the album reminds us that there are actually two ‘Abbey Road’s’; the songs and the album cover itself. Possibly more iconic than the Sgt Pepper’s album cover two years previously, the image of the four Beatles on a zebra crossing has received homage from artists such as Booker T and The MG’s, The Red Hot Chill Peppers, Phil Collins, Paul McCartney himself, as well as Sponge Bob Square Pants and The Simpsons.
The album packaging adds greatly to the evident optimism reflected on the songs within, and yet at the same time offers some suggestive pictorial evidence of the end itself for the group. Much has been written about the cover photograph, such as the four walking away from Abbey Road Studios (then called EMI Studios, and renamed after the release of the album) perhaps representing the bands finale. Indeed if we were to borrow some fanciful observations from the ‘Paul is dead’ believers, we could even discern that the dress code of all four members, John – Minister, Ringo – Undertaker, Paul – Deceased, George – Gravedigger, represents a funeral not for the supposedly dead McCartney, but rather for the band itself.
One thing that is evident about this record is its refusal to date; unlike the psychedelic rock sounds of Revolver or Sgt Peppers, these songs don’t fit as easily into the context of the Beatles ‘1960’s sound’, they sound different, more tightly constructed, with a glossy production which leaps out of the speakers, even after 40 years.
Lennon’s opener ‘Come Together’ is an exhilarating rocker, featuring his trade mark Lewis Carroll influenced, nonsense-verse styled lyrics. During the opening bars, and the verse restarts, Lennon can clearly be heard whispering ‘Shoot Me’ behind the drum and bass parts. Although possibly a reference to his heroin habit, perhaps he had premonitions of his own fate. The previous year he recorded a track on the ‘White Album’ with a chorus exclaiming ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun (Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot), and during his last interview on December 8th 1980, only hours before his death, he was asked, “How do you think you’ll go?”, to which he replied; “I’ll probably be popped off by some loony”. The individual performances by all four are dazzling. McCartney’s effortlessly cool bass sliding up the fret board, the perfect partner to Starr's busy hi-hat and tom-tom phrases, his drums sounding louder and more refined than on any previous Beatle recording. During the Playboy interviews of 1980, Lennon positively beamed with pride; “It’s my favourite Beatles [Lennon] track… […]…I’d buy it.”
Track two is Harrisons magnum opus; ‘Something’. Conceded to be the best song on the album by Lennon, heralded as the greatest love song ever written by Frank Sinatra, and covered by greats such as; Smokey Robinson, James Brown, Tony Bennet, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley and Sinatra himself among others, Harrison had finally stepped out of the shadow of Lennon-McCartney. Rumoured to have been written about his failing relationship with his wife, the actress and model Pattie Boyd (about whom his friend Eric Clapton would later write ‘Layla’ and ‘Wonderful Tonight’) ‘Something’ is a beautiful love song, swaying from sighs of resignation to the optimism and hope of the dramatic and upbeat middle eighth; “You're asking me will my love grow?”, “I don’t know, I don’t know” Harrison screams in response. The middle eighth takes off, and floats majestically into Harrison’s tender guitar solo, augmented by rousing strings, before being brought back to earth gently for the final reprise of Harrison’s dilemma. Again, the musicianship is magnificent. McCartney’s bass is more lead guitar than bottom backing, adding significantly to the mood of the song. Starr’s drumming is inspired, with just the right amount of expressive fills, nothing overdone. While Harrison’s solo is his finest to grace a Beatle track. His first Beatles ‘A’ side, the track won him an Ivor Novello award, and hit the number one spot in America, although it only peaked at number four in his native Britain. The lyric “He shoot Coca-Cola” on the single's other A-side (the aforementioned ‘Come Together’) earned it a BBC ban for inappropriate product-placement.
McCartney’s first track on the album, according to the running order, is a hit and miss affair. ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ tried the group's collective patience during the Let it Be sessions, with McCartney’s fastidious attempts at perfecting, what the others deemed a joke track. Indeed McCartney’s snigger during the “...Writing fifty times...” line is allegedly the result of Lennon mooning him from the control room. That said, rivals must have looked on with envy. It’s a measure of the group’s talent and diversity when a track viewed by the majority of the band as a mere annoyance could still be so insanely catchy.
McCartney gets down to business proper with ‘Oh Darling’, a noisy little rocker in the style of a fifties doo wop classic. Complete with trade mark harmonies, wild piano and some nifty chaos on the drums from Starr, ‘Oh Darling’ allowed McCartney to roll out his ‘Little Richard’ voice once more. His vocal is without doubt the most impressive on the album. Is McCartney declaring dependence on his new wife, or is his ‘Darling’ the group he’s been with for the past thirteen years and can’t fathom life without? The lyric “If you leave me, I’ll never make it alone” seems to provide an uncanny prophecy. Its author suffered a bout of deep and dark depression following the group’s demise.
‘Octopus’s Garden’ has more depth and sincerity than is initially obvious. One of Starr's rare compositions, the song has some interesting drumming, pretty jangly guitar from Lennon, and more than enough country and blues styled guitar parts thrown in from George to allow it to hold its own. With its meaning described as ‘cosmic’ and ‘peaceful’ by Harrison, are the lyrics a subconscious attempt at wishing away the troubles? ‘We could be warm, below the storm’. Despite its light and disposable vibe, the sound effects constructed to make the backing vocals sound submerged are pure inspiration.
‘I Want You (She’s so heavy)’, a dark and noisy affair only Lennon could produce, provides, along with ‘Come Together’, the perfect counterweight to the rest of the albums material and saves it from sounding lightweight or banal. To quote George Martin, “John was the vinegar to Paul’s virgin olive oil”. The track could be interpreted as an extension of his desperate pleas for Ono to reciprocate his love and devotion, which he first set forth in ‘Don’t Let Me Down’.
The second of Harrison’s two tracks on the album is the joyously optimistic ‘Here Comes the Sun’. Where ‘Something’ is bitter-sweet and downbeat with a flurry of optimism, ‘Here Comes the Sun’ is unashamedly prophetic and optimistic. Unfortunately, the bright message of ‘its [going to be] alright’ is aimed not at the band, but at the authors future beyond the Beatles. This is indeed an assertion of independence and optimism from a man who when once asked what it was like to be a Beatle, replied; “I don’t know, what’s it like not being a Beatle?”
Starr again provides some song-saving drumming, providing the glue on the daring middle eighth and gelling incredibly well with handclaps to land the track back down perfectly in time for the last verse. Harrison’s moog synthesizer and up front acoustic guitar help to pull this record sonically out if its sixties context and, ‘All You Need Is Love aside, little else in the Beatles catalogue can match this for sheer positivity.
The very last track recorded for Abbey Road, and the last track the four Beatles ever recorded together was Lennon’s ‘Because’, a surreal trip through stirring images of nature, which sounds as much the work of Yoko Ono as it does her husband. Nine voices in all make up the complex harmony which Lennon/McCartney/Harrison all admired in retrospect, and are accompanied by a harpsichord, guitar and synthesiser playing the reverse chords of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
In ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, McCartney is the first to broach the painful issues confronting the band. The track, more suite than song, meanders (not unlike ‘Something’) from resigned sadness and dissatisfaction to relief and optimism; ‘Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go’, ‘One sweet dream came true today’, and ‘Step on the gas and wipe that tear away’. McCartney was admitting defeat and facing a future without his pals. The song begins the final ‘long medley’ that winds up the album, although not before running through multiple styles and going out with a loud bang. Lennon’s ‘Sun King’, toys with Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’, while throwing more images of happiness and high spirits into the overall mix, before fading into ‘Mean Mr Mustard’; and the record is off on the home straight.
Mean Mr Mustard is a throwback to the tongue and cheek pop that made Sgt Pepper’s great which plods along carelessly before bursting into the huge acoustic chords of ‘Polythene Pam’. Lennon reverts to the very thick scouse accent his Aunt Mimi tried so hard to knock out of him, while the drums, bass and acoustic guitars all collide perfectly to make for a chaotic and thunderous romp through the bands working class days in Liverpool, complete with Yeah, Yeah Yeah’s stolen from ‘She Loves You’, a throwback to fresh faced days of innocence. Seamless and a pure joy are the meeting of ‘Polythene Pam’ and ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window’, another electrifying rocker and the subject of sneaky kleptomaniac female fans, who’ll stop at nothing for a piece of McCartney.
‘Golden Slumbers’ announces intermission with a gentle piano and vocal intro by McCartney, putting his own melody to a seventeenth century nursery rhyme. Starr’s bursting drums pave the way for one of McCartney’s most emotional and hair raising vocals yet; before Starr’s continual pounding drops us into ‘Carry That Weight’, complete with a reprise of ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’. In ‘Carry That Weight’ a group chorus declares that whatever they do from here on as individuals, they are all going to ‘carry that weight’ of being Beatles with them forever, nothing they do as solo artists will eclipse their careers over the past seven years.
This is it, ‘The End’, time for one last jam; Starr breaks his own rule and finally commits a loud and raucous drum solo to tape, his lead is picked up by his band mates who each slam their way through three, two-bar guitar solos’ in rotating order of McCartney-Harrison-Lennon in a heavy rock ’n’ roll crescendo (which is surely the inspiration for the end sequence of the Stone Rose’s ‘I am the Resurrection’) echoing their roots, before finally winding it all up with a little ‘Beatles’ wisdom; “and in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make”, pretty simple really.
McCartney’s previously discarded segment, ‘Her Majesty’ makes a comeback from the cutting room floor, echoing Lennon’s two fingered salute to the British establishment six years earlier, and thus, after opening the Beatles recording career with the energetic ‘1-2-3-FAW!’ of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, McCartney bookends the Beatles career on tape…or does he? Less than one year later, ‘Let it Be’, the album he would come to detest was released, and the last track on side two fades out with John Lennon getting the last word; “I’d like to thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition”
Abbey Road might not be the best album by the best band of all time, but it’s certainly in the top three. The albums pioneering of 16 track recording consoles, synthesisers, compressors, and limiters opened the door for the recording of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and subsequently the birth of prog rock, and without its bright and positive character the Beatles career might have ended on the more gloomy and chaotic ‘Let it Be’.
If you have the album, play it loud this September 26th. If you don’t have it go out and buy it, It’s essential listening.
Happy 40th birthday, Abbey Road

Chuck Klosterman's unique perspective on The Beatles re-masters

Chuck Klosterman Repeats The Beatles

by Chuck Klosterman September 8, 2009

Like most people, I was initially confused by EMI’s decision to release remastered versions of all 13 albums by the Liverpool pop group Beatles, a 1960s band so obscure that their music is not even available on iTunes. The entire proposition seems like a boondoggle. I mean, who is interested in old music? And who would want to listen to anything so inconveniently delivered on massive four-inch metal discs with sharp, dangerous edges? The answer: no one. When the box arrived in the mail, I briefly considered smashing the entire unopened collection with a ball-peen hammer and throwing it into the mouth of a lion. But then, against my better judgment, I arbitrarily decided to give this hippie shit an informal listen. And I gotta admit—I’m impressed. This band was mad prolific.It is not easy to categorize the Beatles’ music; more than any other group, their sound can be described as “Beatlesque.” It’s akin to a combination of Badfinger, Oasis, Corner Shop, and everyother rock band that’s ever existed.

The clandestine power derived from the autonomy of the group’s composition—each Beatle has his own distinct persona, even though their given names are almost impossible to remember. There was John Lennon (the mean one), Paul Stereo versionMcCartney (the hummus eater), George Harrison (the best dancer), and drummer Ringo Starr (The Cat). Even the most casual consumers will be overwhelmed by the level of invention and the degree of change displayed over their scant eight-year recording career, a span complicated by McCartney’s tragic 1966 death and the 1968 addition of Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono, a woman so beloved by the band that they requested her physical presence in the studio during the making of Let It Be.There are 217 songs on this anthology, many of which seem like snippets of conversation between teenagers who spend an inordinate amount of time at the post office.

The Beatles’ “long play” debut, Please Please Me, came in 1963, opening with a few rudimentary remarks from Mr. McCartney: “Well, she was just 17 / If you know what I mean.” If this is supposed to indicate that the female in question was born in 1946, then yes, we know exactly what you mean, Paul. If it means something else, I remain in the dark. These young, sensitive, genteel-yet-stalkerish Beatles sure did spend a lot of time thinking about girls. Virtually every song they wrote during this period focuses on the establishment and recognition of consensual romance, often through paper and quill (“P.S. I Love You”), sometimes by means of monosyllabic nonsense (“Love Me Do”), and occasionally through oral sex (“Please Please Me”). The intensely private Mr. Harrison asks a few coquettish questions two-thirds of the way through the opus (“Do You Want To Know A Secret”) before Mr. Lennon obliterates the back door with the greatest rock voice of all time, accidentally inventing Matthew Broderick’s career. There are a few bricks hither and yon (thanks for wasting 123 seconds of my precious life, Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow) but on balance, I have to give Please Please Me an A, despite the fact that it doesn’t really have a proper single.

Things get more interesting on With The Beatles, particularly for audiences who feel the hi-hat should be the dominant musical instrument on all musical recordings. Only one track lasts longer than three minutes, but structurally, it would appear that the Beatles were more musical than any songwriters who had ever come before them, even when performing material that had been conceived for The Music Man. It’s hard to understand why the rock press wasn’t covering the Beatles during this stretch of their career; one can only assume that the band members’ lack of charisma and uneasy rapport made them unappealing to the mainstream media. Still, the music itself has verve—With The Beatles earns another A.

A Hard Day’s Night provided the soundtrack for a 1964 British movie of the same name, a film mostly remembered for its subtle advocacy of euthanasia. The album initiates like the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man,” and never gets any worse. These Beatles were doomed to a career in the cut-out bin of record stores, but they were clearly learning lessons about life: Though they’d covered “Money (That’s What I Want)” just one year before, they had now reached the conclusion Mono versionthat money cannot purchase love. It was a period of inner growth and introspection—they wanted to know why people cry and why people lie, and they embraced the impermanent pleasure of dance. They also experimented with the harmonica, but that turned out okay. I was originally going to give Hard Day’s Night an A-, but then I heard the middle eighth from “You Can’t Do That” (“Ev’rybody’s greeeeeen / ’Cause I’m the one who won your love”), so I’m changing my grade to A. I assume the accompanying movie is on hulu or something, but I don’t feel like searching for it.

The Beatles get darker and (I guess) cheaper on Beatles For Sale, now fixating on their insecurities (“I’m A Loser”) and how difficult it is to waltz a girl into bed when her ex is a corpse (“Baby’s In Black”). There are a bunch of unexpected covers on this album, so it’s kind of like Van Halen’s Diver Down. It only warrants a B, despite the tear-generating mondo-pleasure of “I’ll Follow The Sun.” More importantly, Beatles For Sale nicely sets the supper table for Help!, a mesmerizing combination of who the Beatles used to be and who they were about to become. The signature track is “Yesterday” (the last song Mr. McCartney recorded before his death in an early-morning car accident), but the best cut is “You’re Going To Lose That Girl,” a song that oozes with moral ambiguity. Is “You’re Going To Lose That Girl” an example of Mr. McCartney’s fresh-faced enlightenment (in that he threatens to punish some dude for being an unresponsive boyfriend), or an illustration of Mr. Lennon’s quiet misogyny (in that he views women as empty, non-specific possessions that can be pillaged from male rivals)? Each possibility seems both plausible and impossible.

What makes Beatles lyrics so wonderful is not that they can be interpreted to mean whatever the listener wants; what makes them wonderful is the way they seamlessly adopt contradictory (yet equally valid) interpretations as the listener matures. It’s unfathomable how a couple of going-nowhere guys in their early 20s could be this emotively sophisticated, but that’s why the little-known Help! gets an A.

After Mr. McCartney was buried near Beaconsfield Road in Liverpool, Beatles bass-playing duties were secretly assigned to William Campbell, a McCartney sound-alike and an NBA-caliber smokehound. This lineup change resulted in the companion albums Rubber Soul and Revolver, both of which are okay. Despite its commercial failure, Rubber Soul allegedly caused half-deaf Brian Wilson to make Pet Sounds. (I assume this is also why EMI released a mono version of the catalogue—it allows consumers to experience this album the same way Wilson did.) If you like harmonies or guitar overdubs or the sun or Norwegian lesbians or taking drugs during funerals, you will probably sleep with these records on the first date. Rubber Soul gets an A- because I don’t speak French. Revolver gets an A+, mostly because of “She Said She Said” and “For No One,” but partially because I hate filing my taxes.1967 proved to be a turning point for the Beatles—the overwhelming lack of public interest made touring a fiscal impossibility, subsequently forcing them to focus exclusively on studio recordings.

Spearheaded by the increasingly mustachioed Fake Paul, the four Beatles donned comedic Technicolor dreamcoats, consumed 700 sheets of mediocre acid on the roof of the studio, and proceeded to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a groundbreaking album no one actually likes. A concept album about finding a halfway decent song for Ringo, Sgt. Pepper has a few satisfactory moments (“Lovely Rita” totally nails the experience of almost having sex with a city employee), but this is only B+ work. It mostly seems like a slightly superior incarnation of The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, a record that (ironically) came out seven months after this one. Pop archivists might be intrigued by this strange parallel between the Beatles and the Stones catalogue—it often seems as if every interesting thing The Rolling Stones ever did was directly preceded by something the Beatles had already accomplished, and it almost feels like the Stones completely stopped evolving once the Beatles broke up in 1970. But this, of course, is simply a coincidence. I mean, what kind of bozo would compare the Beatles to The Rolling Stones?

After the humiliating public failure of Pepper, the Beatles returned to form with Magical Mystery Tour, an unsubtle compilation of the trippiest (“Blue Jay Way”) and kid-friendliest (“Your Mother Should Know”) material they ever made. “I Am The Walrus” seems like sarcasm, but “Penny Lane” makes me want to purchase a digital camera and apply to barber college. Will history ultimately validate Magical Mystery Tour as the band’s signature work? Only time will tell. A. Now hitting on all 16 cylinders, the Beatles bolted back to the woodshed for The Beatles, a blandly designed masterwork that could inspire any reasonable citizen of California to launch a race war. To this day, we don’t know much about the four men who comprised the Beatles, but listening to this exceedingly non-black album makes one detail totally clear—these guys truly loved each other. How else could they make such wonderful music? In fact, they adored and trusted each other so much that they didn’t even feel the need to perform some of the songs together. It must have been a great era to be in this band. Amazingly, they even wrangled a cameo from noted blues musician Eric Clapton (still best known for his contributions to John Mayhall’s Bluesbreakers).

The Beatles is almost beyond an A+; in retrospect, they probably should have made this a triple album. If nothing else, they could have simply included the five Pepper-y songs from Yellow Submarine (C-), which I think might have been a Halloween record.Let It Be comes next (or last, depending on how you view the universe), and it’s a wholly confusing project—it’s often difficult to tell who is playing lead guitar, and many of the songs could either be about having sex or dropping out of society, which might be the same thing. Fake Paul’s beard looks tremendous, and his (increasingly less-lilting) songs are still beautiful, but his focus feels askew; he seems like a guy who wants to make a record with his wife (which is what Mr. Lennon was already doing, although for totally different reasons). “I’ve Got A Feeling” is my preferred track, but it’s also the first time I really don’t believe what these fellows are trying to tell me. I give Let It Be a B-, although The Replacements get an A and the cast of Sesame Street gets an B+.

Though the artwork for Abbey Road seems eerily familiar (that’s actually my car in the photo’s background), the music it symbolizes is vaguely alien—I don’t know why they wrote a song about a Clue character, but that’s par for the course for these lovemaking, chain-smoking longhairs. The opener sucks (seems as crappy as mid-period Aerosmith), but Mr. Harrison follows with a wedding song that effortlessly proves why people who try to quantify visceral emotion should just stop trying. The entire band seems oddly unserious on this endeavor, but in the best possible way—for the first time in a long time, they sound as free as they look. That said, the audio quality is especially heavy and detailed; one suspects most of the arduous lifting on Abbey Road fell on the shoulders of unheralded Jeff Beck producer George Martin. Everything ends with “The End,” but then Fake Paul decided to add a superfluous 24-second mini-song that wipes away any historical closure Abbey Road might have otherwise achieved. The real Mr. McCartney would have never even considered such frivolity. I give Abbey Road an A, but begrudgingly.I’ve noticed that this EMI box also includes the gratuitously titled singles collection Past Masters, but I’m not even going to play it. How could a song called “Rain” not be boring? I feel like I’ve already heard enough. These are nice little albums, but I can’t imagine anyone actually shelling out $260 to buy these discs. There’s just too much great free music on the Internet, you know? You might find the instructional, third-person perspective of “Sie Leibt Dich” charming and snappy (particularly if you’re trying to learn German the hard way), but first check out “myspace.org,” a popular website with a forward-thinking musical flavor. That, my rockers, is the future. That, and videogames.

Chuck Klosterman is the author of six books, including the 2008 novel Downtown Owl and the forthcoming collection Eating The Dinosaur.

Please please play me

Brian Boyd wrting in The Irish Times - Spetember 4th 2009

Fab Fourmat: play at being Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison (left to right) using The Beatles Rock Band music video game which is released next weekIn this section »
Blessed with the creative and historical input of Paul and Ringo, The Beatles Rock Band is set to change the face of music video games – what a thrill to get the chance to replicate musical history, writes BRIAN BOYD

THE WEATHER in London on January 30th, 1969 was cold and very windy. Paul McCartney remembers the day well because it was the last time The Beatles performed together. When the producers of the music video game, The Beatles Rock Band , gave him a preview of the game, he saw an animated version of that last-ever gig.

Everything was perfect about the recreation, but for one thing: their hair wasn’t blowing around in the wind as McCartney distinctly remembered. The producers went back and added in a hair-being-blown-around-in-the-wind effect.

That sort of attention to detail (and reminder of just how hands-on McCartney and Ringo Starr were in the game’s production) is one reason why The Beatles Rock Band is such a significant release.

Music games are one of the few massive growth areas in the industry. The two main players in the field, Rock Band and Guitar Hero , have earned more than $3 billion over the last decade.

To date, the music game industry has largely been the preserve of hard rock music, and the typical gamer is young and male. Expect that to change now that the biggest and best music group ever has joined the fray. This not just the Rock Band franchise’s biggest release, it is arguably the most important music game release ever.

The Beatles have a unique pan-generational appeal. The Beatles Rock Band is so lavishly produced, and so simple to play, that the sales of the consoles (PlayStation, Xbox and Wii) are expected to spike over the next few weeks, as people who’ve previously found the idea of playing videos games alien to them will want to get this one.

The attraction of music games, as opposed to traditional shoot-’em-ups, is that gamers can play along with the songs on instrument-shaped plastic controllers (guitars, drums, etc). The goal is to keep in rhythmic time with the song being played.

With The Beatles Rock Band predicted to become the biggest selling entertainment commodity of 2009, it remains something of a surprise that a band who have so zealously guarded their musical legacy agreed to licence their songs to something so lowly as a video game. The Beatles aren’t even up on iTunes, and they only very rarely allow their songs to be used in TV programmes, films or on Greatest Hits compilations.

The Beatles as a legal entity today (McCartney, Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono) only agreed to this game because of a chance meeting between George Harrison’s son, Dhani Harrison, and Van Toffler, a top executive at MTV. Harrison was on holidays three years ago and had brought along the new Guitar Hero video game. He bumped into Toffler (MTV owns Harmonix, which eventually produced the game) and the two got talking about how the games industry and how significant a development it would be if there were ever to be a Beatles game.

Harrison brought the idea to his mother, McCartney, Starr and Ono, who agreed that a properly done music game could sit as an important part of the band’s canon. They also reasoned that, as The Beatles were musical innovators, it would be appropriate to be involved in the innovative world of music games. Plus, they would be embracing “interactivity” – a word they usually baulked at.

The Beatles have previously turned down multi-million-pound deals if it meant handing their music over to a third party (for fear of how it would be used). And because of the way Apple Corp (their management company) is set up, McCartney, Starr, Ono and Olivia Harrison have the power to veto any proposed project relating to the band’s music. Which makes decision-making a tortuous process. The only way to get them in on anything is to involve all four of them at every step of the way.

The game includes 45 Beatles songs and is broken down to show the band in very accurate animation form at different stages of their career. You see them first playing at the Liverpool’s Cavern Club, then on to the Ed Sullivan show in the US. As the timeline progresses, you take in their famous Shea Stadium show, as well as that last-ever gig on top of the Apple Building.

All the “live” songs on the game are accompanied by footage of how fans would have behaved during the Beatlemania era. The producers studied books about 1960s fashions in order to “dress” audience members appropriately.

Because The Beatles stopped touring in 1966 and became studio-bound, the songs from that time are recreated in a special “Dreamscapes” mode: for Octopus’s Garden, they play in an underwater setting; for Here Comes the Sun , they stand on top of a flowered hill on a sunny day.

The real fun part of the game comes from using the “peripherals” – the instruments you need to participate (which are sold separate to the game). These are replicas of the Rickenbacker, Gretsch Duo Jet and Hofner guitars used by the band, as well as a Ludwig-branded replica drum kit. There are also microphones available, and the idea is the better you match the group’s three-part harmonies on the songs, the more points you amass on the game.

It’s only when you strap on a guitar and get miked that you realise what a thrill it is to – in virtual way – replicate what is, by any standards, musical history. When this journalist went to a preview of the game during the summer, fights nearly broke out over who would play lead, who would play bass, who would play drums – and that was before the sulks and tears over what song to play.

With four different levels of difficulty (from absolute “I’m all thumbs” beginner level to hardcore gamer-freak level), there is no sense that you need any level of gaming proficiency to throw yourself into the songs. And giving the game a sort of spooky feel is the real, and never before released, in-studio chatting between the four.

The idea was to “intensify people’s engagement with the music”, something you can only really appreciate when you strap on Lennon’s guitar (albeit a small and plastic replica) and play his guitar line on Day Tripper . The longer you spend fiddling around with the game, the more you discover. For example, there’s a “drum trainer” in there somewhere, which teaches you to play Ringo’s trademark drum fills. And those who play through all 45 songs (only 44 titles are known; one will remain a mystery until the game’s debut next week) will get to listen to the ultra-rare and long out-of-print 1963 fan-club only Christmas song The Beatles recorded.

The attention to detail on the game is superb. The venues, the haircuts, the clothes, the instruments – a lot of work was put in ensuring everything was just as it was. But that’s no big surprise when the game’s two “fact-checkers in chief” are Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, who both raided their own archives to check and double-check details.

It is this mix of pedantic detail under a front story of how popular music was thrillingly transformed by the Fab Four that really makes The Beatles Rock Band soar. Or, as McCartney put it when he saw (and played) the finished product: “It does reflect The Beatles . . . the reality and the mythology ”.

The Beatles Rock Band is released on September 9th
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times