Everyone has a favourite Beatles album. Purists tend to choose Revolver, while more pop-minded types prefer Sgt Peppers. Some deluded maniacs will even try and convince you that Let It Be is a classic. But I’d argue that the best, most inventive and original Beatles album of all is their self titled double-album. Or, to give it the name that it has long since been known by, The White Album.

Just how would The Beatles top their previous album, the insanely successful Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? The expectation was that they would bang out another psychedelic masterpiece that would cement their position as the world’s best and biggest band. In fact The Beatles were starting to fracture as a group and The White Album strongly reflects this. Their mentor, Brian Epstein, had died the previous year and tensions between the individual members were running high. Ringo walked out of the sessions for Back In The U.S.S.R., essentially quitting the band for two weeks, and many of the songs for the album were recorded solo by the various members. To clear their heads, the whole band embarked on a trip to a spiritual retreat in Rishikesh, India, to study Transcendental Meditation and work on their songs in a more relaxed environment. They succeeded in producing a lot of good material, but returned home disillusioned with the Maharishi they were studying under.

When The White Album finally arrived it was a sprawling, ramshackle affair. Predictably, it was a huge success, selling more than two-million copies in its first week in America. More than ever before this seemed like the work of four solo artists who just happen to share the same band name. Rather than being a negative thing, I think that it is this that gives The White Album its unique feel. Taken as a group, all four artists work is much more palatable than on their actual solo albums. There’s also more room for George Harrison songs, and even Ringo gets to shine on tracks like Don’t Pass Me By.

That’s not to say that The White Album is perfect – it’s not. Some of it is dreadful. There’s a lot of filler with songs like Long, Long, Long and Wild Honey Pie. Glass Onion is a deeply self indulgent Lennon in-joke, though admittedly quite a cool one; and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da is quite possibly the worst thing you will ever hear in your life. But alongside all this, you’ve got Lennon at his absolute best with Happiness Is A Warm Gun, I’m So Tired and Dear Prudence; great rockers like Helter Skelter, and sweet ballads like Blackbird and While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Then there’s the stuff that defies all categorisation…

Listeners fall into two camps with Revolution 9. It’s either Lennon mucking about in a studio with lots of bits of tape and Yoko Ono, or a brave and inventive sound collage that’s one of album’s real highlights. I fall into the latter. Revolution 9 is great and, frankly, if all you’re hearing when you listen to it is noise, then you need new ears. By turns hilarious and sinister, it is discordant and jumbled, but there’s still a weird musicality to it. And what better way to finish off this most unpredictable of albums than with eight minutes of garbled sonics followed by a sweet Ringo lullaby?
The Beatles have come to represent a sort of horrible worthiness in recent years with legions of dreary Britpop bands claiming them as their own. It’s not true or fair. The Beatles were far more adventurous than that and I think that The White Album is the strongest proof of that. It may not be as consistent as something like Revolver, but it’s their most interesting and ultimately most rewarding work.