The 50 best Beatles songs

Album: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

No one knits together the grandiose and the mundane like The Beatles. Lyrically, ‘A Day in the Life’ is pure poetic banality: John goes to the pictures and worries about holes in the road while Paul gets startled by his alarm clock and smokes a joint on the bus. But musically it’s an apocalypse: from the concrete opening piano chords to the queasy orchestral climax, this song feels like the end of, well, everything. 

Album: Abbey Road

With its jarring intro, dense drum fills and aggressively staggered vocal delivery, ‘Come Together’ offers up a gruffer, harder intro to Abbey Road than what came before, unknowingly announcing a darker turn in the band’s bubblegum psychedelia. It’s since been played to death, but even today it’s a startling opening shot, and one of the few Abbey Road songs that truly functions without the benefit of everything else surrounding it. 

‘Blackbird’ is a bit of an outlier on the White Album; no thrashing chords, no screaming chorus, stripped right down to a guitar and vocals. The song is actually about the Little Rock Nine during the Civil Rights Movement, and the story goes that McCartney leaned out the window and played it for the first time one night to fans camped outside his house. And that distinctive  metronome tapping? Apparently that’s just the taps of his very in-time foot. 

Album: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Has there ever been a more perfect marriage of tripped-out psychedelia with pure, perfect pop? Probably not, and there probably never will be. Primarily written by the group’s resident surrealist, it’s arguably one of Lennon’s greatest pieces and has his mark stamped all over it – but Macca’s woozy Mellotron intro is unarguably brilliant and still capable of inducing a few goosebumps. Originally recorded during the Sgt Pepper sessions, George Martin later decided to remove the track from the album along with ‘Penny Lane’, after releasing both songs as a double A-side. Marketing-wise, a bad move – but in hindsight it just added to the individual allure of what continues to be a genuinely magical mystery of a song. 

So many Beatles songs are (justifiably) loved for their vocal immaculacy, for their gorgeous group harmonies and marvellously controlled melodies. All of which makes ‘Oh! Darling’ the more special. Sure, this retro rock ‘n’ roll ballad features sublime and sugary ‘50s-style backing vocals, but it’s the lead that really captures: McCartney’s voice straining at the high bits and going feral in the lows, shredding his vocal chords in the process. ‘Oh! Darling’ is a desperate, pleading, helpless love song – and McCartney’s raw howling both hammers it home and jettisons the tune to greatness.

Album: Help!

‘The whole Beatles thing was just beyond comprehension. I was subconsciously crying out for help,’ is what John Lennon said of this song in 1980. Some fans might reckon this song has been a tad overexposed over the years (it’s been covered by everyone from Bananarama to Deep Purple), but the band’s ability to spin personal anguish into folk-pop gold remains genius-level. 

‘Hello, Goodbye’ doesn’t give you a chance to ease into the song, immediately opening with its main refrain. It’s from the boys’ slightly weirder era, so the lyrics don’t necessarily make sense, but it was the first one they released after the death of their then manager Brian Epstein, and it definitely has a celebration of life quality to it – even if Lennon himself later referred to it as ‘three minutes of contradictions and meaningless juxtapositions’.

Album: Revolver

Eternally imitated and never matched, this song changed music – no question. The squiggly tape loops, George’s backwards guitar, Ringo’s endless backbeat, Paul’s ‘om’ of a bassline and John’s whacked-out Tibetan pronouncements on life, death and oblivion still sound totally electrifying in 2017. In 1966 it must have sounded like the end of the world, or the start of a new one.

Album: Revolver

It starts with a growl, a ‘Goon Show’ voice counting in, then George smacks you in the face and we’re away. ‘Taxman’ wasn’t The Beatles’ first experiment with off-beam time signatures – ‘Ticket to Ride’ and ‘She’s a Woman’ had led the charge – but this was something else: you get the distinct sense that if Ringo’s backbeat and John’s rhythm guitar were just a little less vice-like in their precision, the whole edifice would fall to bits. The lyrics are, of course, whinging rock star bollocks, but everything else is glorious. 

Album: The Beatles' Second Album

Fact: this is the Beatles’ best-selling single. Fact: this is the UK’s best-selling single of the ’60s, bar none. Fact: it’s still almost ludicrously exciting to listen to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.