As dazzling as the decade they dominated, The Beatles almost single-handedly created pop music as we know it. Today, their songs are cited as seminal influences by stars like Oasis, Blur and Kula Shaker. Eloquently giving voice to their time, The Beatles quite simply changed the world.
Fully updated to include material from The Beatles Live at theBBC and the Anthology series, this acclaimed book goes back to the heart of The Beatles - their records. Drawing on a unique resource of knowledge and experience to 'read' their 241 tracks - chronologically from their first amateur efforts in 1957 to 'Real Love', their final 'reunion' recording in 1995 - Ian MacDonald has created an engrossing classic of popular criticism in which the extraordinary songs of The Beatles remain a central and continually surprising presence.
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The finest piece of fabs scholarship ever published. - Mojo
'The masterpiece The Beatles deserved.' - Vox
'The most sustained brilliant piece of pop criticism and scholarship for years.An astonishing achievement.' - Q
'No book has ever taken us closer to the actual music of The Beatles...A brilliant piece of work.' - Daily Telegraph
'Consistently brilliant.The Beatles have never been so discriminately adored.' - Sunday Times
'An unprecedented critical feat...The most powerful and enlightening work on British pop since Jon Savage's England's Dreaming.' - Time Out
'A tour de force of pop/rock criticism...A complex swan-song for the decade when pop music really mattered.' - Irish Tribune
'Impassioned, compelling...It's a vigorous testament to the legacy of The Beatles that it can provoke work as challenging as this.' - Guardian
'Beatles books are an industry; this product pretty much closes down the factory.' - Guardian
'Arguably the most indispensable Beatles book ever published has just become more indispensable...' - Uncut
'In Ian MacDonald, The Beatles at last have a critic worthy of their oeuvre...A pinnacle of popular music criticism.' - Independent
'In a hundred years' time, books such as MacDonald's will be crucial texts for anybody who wants to understand what British post-war culture was about.' - Sunday Times
Ian MacDonald was born in 1948. A writer with many interests, he was Assistant Editor of the New Musical Express during 1972-5. He has also worked as a songwriter and record producer, and is the author of The New Shostakovich, The People's Music and The Beatles at No. 1.He died in 2003.
