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Tue 8 September 2026 18:00, UK
The Beatles were constantly changing up their style of music, and as such, picking a favourite album of theirs can be difficult.
If you want something concept-heavy, then you can look towards Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. If you’re after some of their more complex and mind-bending music, then you should listen to Revolver. If you want an album where the tone of each individual can be heard clearly, then give Abbey Road or The White Album a spin. They all provide something different, and it’s that versatility that makes the band so timeless.
However, despite these constant changes in style and sound, there is no escaping the fact that The Beatles first won the hearts of millions by writing catchy pop tunes that everybody could dance to and enjoy themselves. In the early 1960s, when they first started seeing glimpses of chart success and before they had officially made the jump over to the States, a lot of their songs consisted mainly of the band belting out a few fun-sounding harmonies and letting the people dance.
It wasn’t the most complex or layered music out there, but it was still absolutely necessary. The timing of The Beatles making this sort of music couldn’t have been more perfect. The UK was still in a tricky situation following World War II, as the economy continued on a downward slope and the future looked bleak. Then you had these four lads from Liverpool come along, belting out sweet-sounding harmonies and essentially just allowing the world to have fun with music again.
While the sounds of Black Sabbath and The Beatles might be far removed from one another, there is a connection. To this day, Ozzy Osbourne’s description of the band and the impact they had not only on him, but the rest of the world, rings true.
“The only way I can describe it is like this,” he said, “‘Imagine you go to bed today and the world is black and white, and then you wake up, and everything’s in colour’. That’s what it was like! That’s the profound effect it had on me.”
Because of the jovial nature of the band in the early ‘60s, a lot of their songs were incredibly fun to play. They had done residencies in Hamburg, which consisted of playing live and getting people dancing, and they were also frequently treading the boards at the now-famous Cavern Club in Liverpool. They liked having fun with their sets, and a lot of the songs they were wheeling out were tracks that the band simply never got tired of playing.
Further reading: From The Vault
One of the best examples of this came in the form of 1963’s ‘This Boy’, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, where they wanted to create the same three-part harmonies that you heard in a lot of Smokey Robinson tracks. They took some sections from ‘To Know Her Is to Love Her’ and managed to intertwine them with a wonderful and layered melody. The result was a track that can still get toes tapping to this day, and that McCartney simply never got tired of singing.
“Fabulous. And we just loved singing that three-part too,” he gushed, “We’d learned that from: [sings] ‘To know know know her is to love love love her…’ We learned that in my dad’s house in Liverpool”.
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