I was unsure who the next Top 10 was going to be, and after a little deliberation. The Beatles seemed to be the best choice. Following the announcement that the classic 90s documentary series 'Anthology' will be remastered by Peter Jackson and set for release in November. As well as digitally enhanced versions of the original eight episodes, there will also be a brand new ninth episode written and directed by Oliver Murray, created from previously unseen behind-the-scenes footage of Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr coming together around the release of the original series.
The series, which was first broadcast by ITV in 1995, was hailed as the definitive documentary on the Beatles thanks to the way it reunited the surviving three Beatles with their producer George Martin, former press officer Derek Taylor and one-time road manager Neil Aspinall to tell the tale of their career in their own words. Its release was accompanied by the single, Free As a Bird, the first new piece of music put out by the scouse quartet since their disbanding.
As well as the documentary, ‘The Anthology Music Collection’ – originally curated by George Martin – will be re-released as three double albums, remastered by Giles Martin. This will include a new ‘Anthology 4’, with 13 previously-unreleased demos and session recordings, as well as new mixes of ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’
It's a very good time to be a fan of the band at the moment. I've never seen the original 'Anthology' and I'm very much looking forward to sitting down and watching it all.
That brings me to my 10 favourite Beatles songs. Here goes.
'Revolver' for many is the greatest Beatles album, a record that gave us 'Taxman', 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'Tomorrow Never Knows'. This one often gets overlooked by casual fans. It's definitely a song about drugs, written by John Lennon with some assistance from George Harrison and partly inspired by actor Peter Fonda's comments during an LSD trip in August 1965 with members of the Beatles and the Byrds.
The song was the last song ever recorded for 'Revolver' and resulted in an argument between members of the band. Paul McCartney walked out of the studio, and subsequently, the song is one of the very few Beatles songs that does not feature McCartney in any capacity.
The song marked the end of an initial dry patch for Lennon; it was the first time he'd brought a song to the studio in a couple of months. This lack of productivity meant that Harrison was afforded an opportunity to have an extra song on the record.
'She Said She Said' alongside 'Tomorrow Never Knows' set the blueprint for acid rock, recounting a conversation on LSD, to three different tunes, in two different time signatures. It's hard to state just how far ahead of the time, The Beatles were.
Another of the band's most important songs, the first song to be released from the band's fifth studio album, 'Help'. It was the first time that the band began to ditch their Merseybeat origins. Music critic and author of the brilliant book 'Revolution in the Head' describes this song as "psychologically deeper than anything the Beatles had recorded before" and "extraordinary for its time.
Written by both Lennon and McCartney in 1965, and is much faster than any of the band's songs before this time. It's much heavier than many have claimed, and the reason for this is due to Lennon and Harrison's first encounter with LSD, which happened around this time. However, Beatles historians have varying dates for this event.
The song's meaning is disputed, although the lyrics are blatantly obvious. Describing a girl riding the life out of something. It's unclear what is meant. McCartney said the title referred to "a British Railways ticket to the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight, whereas Lennon said it described cards indicating a clean bill of health carried by Hamburg prostitutes in the 1960s. The Beatles played in Hamburg early in their musical career, and a "ride" was British slang for having sex.
It marked a stark change for the band; after 'Ticket to Ride' and 'Help', they were never the same band again.
'Nowhere Man' is a song written about John Lennon. Towards the end of the production for 'Rubber Soul', John Lennon had difficulties in coming up with a new song. He spent over five hours trying to come up with another song, and eventually decided to "lie down". During his idling, Lennon suddenly thought of himself as being a "Nowhere Man sitting in his nowhere land".
Lennon then shared the lyrics he had written with McCartney. McCartney said that Lennon wrote the song for himself, personally interpreting it as an "anti-John song" about his own marriage. Lennon had written the song in the third person, deciding to end the song with the lyric "Isn't he a bit like you and me?"
Lennon reflected in a 1980 Playboy interview that:
"I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then 'Nowhere Man' came, words and music, the whole damn thing as I lay down."
It's one of the first songs by the band where love, or romance, isn't a core theme of the song. Instead, a soothing, witty, poetic anthem for those who have found themselves lost along the way.
George Harrison is my favourite of all four Beatles, an exceptional guitar player, a brilliant songwriter, and despite being named as the 'quiet' Beatle. He, in my opinion, is the most interesting; he also, I believe, had the best solo career.
'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' was not the first song Harrison had put on an album, but this was the first album highlight. The 'White Album' contains a lot of songs, some good, ' Back in the U.S.S.R', 'Blackbird', 'Helter Skelter', 'Revolution 1', some bad, ' Revolution 9 ', and some quite forgettable. I know a lot of Beatles fans have this record high up in their rankings, but I don't. I think the records that came before it are better, and the one after it eclipses it.
However, 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' is nothing short of a masterpiece. Written after George had returned from India, where the Beatles had been studying Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi during the spring of 1968. The visit had allowed Harrison to re-engage with the guitar as his primary instrument, after focusing on the Indian sitar for the previous two years, and also marked the start of a prolific period for him as a songwriter.
Inspiration for the song came to him when he was visiting his parents in Warrington, Cheshire, and he began reading the I Ching, or "The Book of Changes". The book is about the Eastern concept that everything is relative to everything else, as opposed to the Western view that things are merely coincidental."
The song seems to bring together everything that had made The Beatles great, a tour de force on humanity's capacity for love, whilst also addressing the band falling out of harmony with each other, and the power of friendship, with a guitar solo played by an uncredited Eric Clapton.
It's the song that proved Harrison could write songs as good as his bandmates. A spectacular affair.
The Beatles wrote a few songs about Liverpool, 'Strawberry Fields Forever', John Lennon’s dreamlike meditation on memory and place, named after Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army children’s home near his childhood house in Woolton. 'Yellow Submarine' – Though whimsical and childlike on the surface, many fans read this as a reflection of Liverpool’s maritime culture. Growing up in a port city, the Beatles were surrounded by nautical imagery, ships, and sailors. In 'Yellow Submarine', the very first line is “In the town where I was born”.While the song quickly drifts into fantasy, that opening grounds it in Liverpool itself.
'One After 909' – Written by Lennon and McCartney in their teens (well before Beatlemania), it’s a train song, which ties directly to Liverpool’s strong railway culture and the idea of escape or travelling beyond their hometown.
However, 'Penny Lane' is comfortably the song where Liverpool takes centre stage. Describing the scenes that the young John, Paul and George would witness while waiting for buses en route to each other’s houses, and named after a street in Liverpool, the song paints a childlike nostalgic look at the street, and the journey the band members would take as young men.
The song sees McCartney follow the storytelling approach he took on 'Eleanor Rigby', another song with nods to Liverpool. The song was the first Beatles song I remember hearing as a kid, and I was fascinated by it. McCartney manages to make the normal seem magical. Lyrically, the song talks about the street and the people on that street; it contains nods to all of the band's childhood, the barbershop where they would get haircuts, as well as the shelter where the band used to meet. Like 'Strawberry Fields', though, the song has surreal moments. The song is seemingly narrated on a fine summer day ("beneath the blue suburban skies"), yet at the same time it is raining ("the fireman rushes in from the pouring rain") and approaching winter ("selling poppies from a tray" implies Remembrance Day, 11 November). It is seen through the eyes of someone looking back, piecing together childhood memories, maybe under the influence. But then again, maybe not, it may be an adult simply looking back at his childhood and wondering what is reality and what is not.
It injected some childlike magic into the psychedelic 60s.
Released as a non-album single in 1967, the band recorded this song to be Britain's contribution to Our World, the first live global television link, for which the band were shown performing it at EMI Studios in London on 25 June. The programme was broadcast via satellite and seen by an audience of over 400 million in 25 countries.
Knowing his audience, Lennon's lyrics were deliberately simplistic, to allow for broad appeal, and captured the utopian ideals associated with the 'Summer of Love'. The single topped sales charts in Britain, the United States and many other countries, and became an anthem for the counterculture's embrace of flower power philosophy.
Our World coincided with the height of the Beatles' popularity and influence, following the release of their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.' Rather than perform the song entirely live, the group played to a pre-recorded backing track. With an orchestral arrangement by George Martin.
The song was a stark and impactful one; in some respects, it's Lennon's first statement about the world. A striking political statement at the height of the Vietnam War and Cold War hostility, four years before 'Happy Xmas (War Is Over) and thirteen years before 'Imagine'
The Beatles were constantly known for breaking musical barriers; they did it in almost every studio session they ever had. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was among their most groundbreaking moments. Strapping two different versions of the song together, smothered in Mellotron, tape loops, Indian swarmandal and backwards silliness, they forged a psychedelic masterwork that set the tone and raised the bar for the era.
Just as 'Penny Lane' saw McCartney reminisce about Liverpool, 'Strawberry Fields' gives Lennon his opportunity.
Looking back at his memories of playing in the garden of the Strawberry Field, Salvation Army Children's Home, a place close to Lennon's childhood home. The song itself has a childhood innocence about it, and many of the places mentioned are real places in Liverpool, yet it is tinged with surrealism and psychedelia. Lennon and his friends Pete Shotton, Nigel Walley and Ivan Vaughan used to play in the wooded garden behind the home.
One of Lennon's childhood treats was the garden party held each summer in Calderstones Park, near the home, where a Salvation Army brass band played.[14] Lennon's aunt Mimi Smith recalled: "There was something about the place that always fascinated John. He could see it from his window … He used to hear the Salvation Army band [playing at the garden party], and he would pull me along, saying, 'Hurry up, Mimi – we're going to be late."
Lyrically, the song is some of Lennon's finest, combining the innocence of childhood with the feelings he was having as a young adult, following The Beatles' stop touring, and watching America turn on him after proclaiming that his band was bigger than Jesus. Lennon had felt this feeling before. As a child, he'd felt isolated and abandoned. “Strawberry Fields is just anywhere you want to go,” said Lennon in a 1968 Rolling Stone interview. Lennon later alluded that he felt a connection to the orphans since there was a sense of abandonment by his parents. “There was something wrong with me,” he said, “I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn’t see.”
It's one of the greatest songs of the 1960s, and one of the most important songs The Beatles ever released.
Spotify’s most-streamed Beatles song, ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ captures George Harrison’s gift for melody and understated optimism. Written in Eric Clapton’s garden during what was, at the time, the sunniest April on record, Harrison had chosen to play truant for the day to avoid attending a meeting at the Beatles' Apple Corps organisation. The lyrics reflect his relief at the arrival of spring and the temporary respite he was experiencing from the band's business affairs.
As George recalled in his autobiography, I Me Mine: “‘Here Comes The Sun’ was written at the time when Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘sign this’ and ‘sign that.’ Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever; by the time spring comes, you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to skip off to Apple, and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote ‘Here Comes The Sun'.
The track radiates warmth and renewal. Its bright acoustic guitar, subtle Moog synthesiser, and layered harmonies made it a standout on 'Abbey Road'. For many, this is Harrison's finest moment in The Beatles.
Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr recorded the rhythm track at EMI Studios (now known as Abbey Road Studios) in 13 takes on 7 July 1969. John Lennon did not contribute to the song, as he was recovering from a car crash. The version of the song that we now know was completed on the 19th August 1969, with the addition of the Moog synthesiser. The mixing session that followed a day later, when the band oversaw the creation of the master tape for Abbey Road, marked the last time that all four Beatles were together in the recording studio.
The song has received universal acclaim, and combined with his other contribution to Abbey Road, 'Something', it gained for Harrison the level of recognition as a songwriter previously reserved for his bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
The song that John Lennon would call his first major work. Despite McCartney claiming he wrote the melody. Lennon stated that this was the first time he had written about himself. According to Lennon, the song's origins can be traced to English journalist Kenneth Allsop's remark that Lennon should write songs about his childhood. Afterwards, Lennon wrote a song in the form of a long poem reminiscing on those years. The original lyrics were based on a bus route he used to take in Liverpool, naming various sites seen along the way, including Penny Lane and Strawberry Field.
Lennon later thought the original lyrics were "ridiculous", calling it "the most boring sort of 'What I Did on My Holidays Bus Trip' song". He reworked the words and replaced the specific memories with a generalised meditation on his past. Very few lines of the original version remained in the finished song.
Despite initially thinking this theme didn't work, both he and McCartney would return to it a couple of years later or 'Strawberry Fields Forever', released as a double-A-side with McCartney's similarly themed 'Penny Lane'.
We know that Lennon wrote the lyrics, but his and McCartney's recollections differ regarding the music. Lennon said that McCartney's "contribution melodically was the harmony and the middle-eight. In 1977, when shown a list of songs Lennon claimed to have written for the magazine Hit Parader, 'In My Life' was the only entry McCartney disputed. McCartney said he set Lennon's lyrics to music from beginning to end.
Despite the disputes, the song is one of the band's most tender affairs, looking back and remembering those from the past. Lennon was only 25 when recording this song, recalling those who had been there on the way, and also those he'd lost. In the song, Lennon recalls the places he remembers, but more importantly, the "lovers and friends" from years gone by. He notes that "some are dead and some are living". Lennon had experienced plenty of loss despite his young age. His beloved mum Julia died in 1958 when he was just 18. Early Beatles member Stuart Sutcliffe died in 1962 at the age of 21.
The song, however, is also about the here and now. The last line of the song often gets misinterpreted to
"In my life, I loved you more." It is actually "In my life, I love you more".
One of the most beautiful songs ever written.
The origins of most modern popular music, with the exception of rap, can be traced directly back to The Beatles’ catalogue. And of all their innovations, none was more groundbreaking than ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ Written in 1966 at the height of their creative restlessness, it stands as their most radical and influential track. John Lennon sought to capture the imagined sound of “monks chanting on a distant mountaintop” to accompany lyrics drawn from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, designed to emulate the experience of an LSD-fuelled transcendental trip. To achieve this, the band transformed the recording studio into a laboratory, pioneering techniques such as tape loops, reversed recordings, sampling, drone textures, and bold tape manipulation.
The result was more than just the apex of psychedelia. It was the moment a mainstream pop audience first encountered both Eastern spiritual philosophy and music as a tool for expanded consciousness. In reshaping the very concept of what a pop song could be, The Beatles inadvertently sketched out the blueprints for entire genres to come—from ambient and electronica to house, techno, and modern dance music. Its impact has echoed through the decades: Oasis name-checked it in ‘Morning Glory,’ while The Chemical Brothers built their 1996 hit ‘Setting Sun’ directly around its hypnotic pulse, effectively reimagining it for the rave generation. Even today, the track is routinely cited as a cornerstone of modern production, its DNA woven through countless strands of contemporary music.
The internal universe exploded; the everyday made epic. Lennon’s ‘Sgt. Pepper…’ closer viewed a series of newspaper articles: about the death of Guinness heir Tara Browne and road repairs in Lancashire, through LSD specs and came out with a world-beating vision. Includes arguably the most famous crescendo in rock.
The song brought the famous 1967 album 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' to an end, and provided the band's crowning moment, on what I consider to be their best album. Turning the era's news stories into dreamlike reflections, only stopping for Paul McCartney's middle section, which evoked a brisk daily routine. A routine he followed, as a young boy in Liverpool, a sharp counterpoint before the song slipped back into Lennon's detached reality.
What truly set the track apart was its sonic daring. The two orchestral crescendos, arguably the most famous in rock history, saw a full symphony orchestra climb from the lowest to the highest notes in chaotic unison, creating a swelling wave of sound unlike anything pop music had previously attempted. The final piano chord, struck simultaneously by multiple hands and left to reverberate for nearly a minute, seemed to suspend time itself, leaving listeners adrift between reality and dream. Decades on, it still stands as one of the most powerful examples of music transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Thank you for reading
Jack