Revolver is the seventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released on 5 August 1966, accompanied by the double A-side single "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine". The album was the Beatles' final recording project before their retirement as live performers and marked the group's most overt use of studio technology to date, building on the advances of their late 1965 release Rubber Soul. It has since become regarded as one of the greatest and most innovative albums in the history of popular music, with recognition centred on its range of musical styles, diverse sounds and lyrical content.
The Beatles recorded Revolver after taking a three-month break at the start of 1966, and during a period when London was feted as the era's cultural capital. Regarded by some commentators as the start of the group's psychedelic period, the songs reflect their interest in the drug LSD, Eastern philosophy and the avant-garde while addressing themes such as death and transcendence of material concerns. With no plans to reproduce their new material in concert, the band made liberal use of automatic double tracking, varispeed, reversed tapes, close audio miking, and instruments outside of their standard live set-up. Among its tracks are "Tomorrow Never Knows", incorporating heavy Indian drone and a collage of tape loops; "Eleanor Rigby", a song about loneliness featuring a string octet as its only musical backing; and "Love You To", a foray into Hindustani classical music. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "Paperback Writer", backed with "Rain".
In the United Kingdom, the album's 14 tracks were gradually distributed to radio stations in the weeks before its release. In North America, Revolver was reduced to 11 songs by Capitol Records, with the omitted three appearing on the June 1966 LP Yesterday and Today. The release there coincided with the Beatles' final concert tour and the controversy surrounding John Lennon's remark that the band had become "more popular than Jesus". The album topped the Record Retailer chart in the UK for seven weeks and the US Billboard Top LPs list for six weeks. Critical reaction was highly favourable in the UK but less so in the US amid the press's unease at the band's outspokenness on contemporary issues.
Revolver expanded the boundaries of pop music, revolutionised standard practices in studio recording, advanced principles espoused by the 1960s counterculture, and inspired the development of psychedelic rock, electronica, progressive rock and world music. The album cover, designed by Klaus Voormann, combined Aubrey Beardsley-inspired line drawing with photo collage and won the 1967 Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts. Aided by the 1987 international CD release, which standardised its content to the original Parlophone version, Revolver has surpassed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) in many critics' estimation as the Beatles' best album. It was ranked first in the 1998 and 2000 editions of Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums and third in the 2003 and 2012 editions of Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". It has been certified double platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and 5× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). A remixed and expanded edition of the album was released in 2022.
Background In December 1965, the Beatles' Rubber Soul album was released to wide critical acclaim. According to David Howard, the limits of pop music "had been raised into the stratosphere" by the release, resulting in a shift in focus away from singles to creating albums of consistently high quality. The following January, the Beatles carried out overdubs on live recordings taken from their 1965 US tour, for inclusion in the concert film The Beatles at Shea Stadium. The group's manager, Brian Epstein, had intended that 1966 would then follow the pattern of the previous two years, in terms of the band making a feature film and an accompanying album, followed by concert tours during the summer months. After the Beatles vetoed the proposed film project, the time allocated for filming became a further three months free of professional engagements. This was the longest period the band members had experienced outside the group collective since 1962, and it defied the convention that pop acts should be working almost continually. The group thereby had an unprecedented amount of time to prepare for a new album.
Beatles biographer Nicholas Schaffner cites 1966 as the start of the band's "psychedelic period", as do musicologists Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc. Schaffner adds: "That adjective [psychedelic] implies not only the influence of certain mind-altering chemicals, but also the freewheeling spectrum of wide-ranging colors that their new music seemed to evoke." Music journalist Carol Clerk describes Revolver as having been "decisively informed by acid", following John Lennon and George Harrison's continued use of the drug LSD since the spring of 1965. Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required). Through these experiences, the two musicians developed a fascination for Eastern philosophical concepts, particularly regarding the illusory nature of human existence. Despite his bandmates' urging, after Ringo Starr had also partaken of the drug, Paul McCartney refused to try LSD. Intent on self-improvement, McCartney drew inspiration from the intellectual stimulation he experienced among London's arts scene, particularly its thriving avant-garde community. With Barry Miles as his guide, he became immersed in the nascent British counterculture movement, which soon emerged as the underground.
While arranging dates for the band's world tour, Epstein agreed to a proposal by journalist Maureen Cleave for the Beatles to be interviewed separately for a series of articles that would explore each of the band members' personality and lifestyle beyond his identity as a Beatle. The articles were published in weekly instalments in London's Evening Standard newspaper throughout March 1966, and reflected the transformation that was underway during the group's months of inactivity. Of the two principal songwriters, Cleave found Lennon to be intuitive, lazy and dissatisfied with fame and his surroundings in the Surrey countryside, while McCartney conveyed confidence and a hunger for knowledge and new creative possibilities. In his book Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock 'n' Roll, Robert Rodriguez writes that, whereas Lennon had been the Beatles' dominant creative force before Revolver, McCartney now attained an approximately equal position with him. In a further development, Harrison's interest in the music and culture of India, and his study of the Indian sitar, had inspired him as a composer. According to Ian Inglis, Revolver is widely viewed as "the album on which Harrison came of age as a songwriter".
Recording
The Beatles had hoped to work in a more modern facility than EMI's London studios at Abbey Road and were impressed with the sound on records created at Stax Studio in Memphis. In March 1966, Epstein investigated the possibility of their recording the new album at Stax, where, according to a letter written by Harrison two months later, the group intended to work with producer Jim Stewart. The idea was abandoned after locals began descending on the Stax building, as were alternative plans to use either Atlantic Studios in New York or Motown's Hitsville USA facility in Detroit.
Recording for the album instead began at EMI Studio 3 in London on 6 April, with George Martin again serving as producer. The first track attempted was Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows", the arrangement for which changed considerably between the initial take that day and the subsequent remake.Liner notes by Mark Lewisohn (1996). Anthology 2 CD booklet. Apple Records. pp. 18–19. This first version of "Tomorrow Never Knows", along with several other outtakes from the album sessions, was included on the 1996 compilation Anthology 2. Also recorded during the Revolver sessions were "Paperback Writer" and "Rain", which were issued as the A and B-side of a non-album single in late May.
The band had worked on ten songs, including both sides of the upcoming single, by 1 May, when they interrupted the sessions to perform at the NME annual Poll-Winners Concert. At a time when Time magazine dubbed London "the Swinging City", belatedly recognising its ascendance as the era's cultural capital, the Beatles drew inspiration from attending concerts by visiting artists, as well as film premieres, plays and other cultural events. From February through June, these musical acts included Stevie Wonder, Roy Orbison, the Lovin' Spoonful, the Mamas & the Papas, Bob Dylan (with whom they socialised extensively), Luciano Berio and Ravi Shankar. During mid-May, Lennon and McCartney attended a private listening party for the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album, and McCartney met Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who filmed Blowup in London, inspired by the contemporary fashion scene.
On 16 May, Epstein responded to a request from Capitol Records, EMI's North American counterpart, to supply three new songs for an upcoming US release, titled Yesterday and Today. Issued on 20 June, this album combined tracks that Capitol had omitted from the Beatles' previous US releases with songs that the band had originally issued on non-album singles. From the six completed recordings for Revolver, Martin selected three Lennon-written songs, since the sessions had favoured his compositions thus far. Keen to limit the interruption to recording that multiple television appearances would create, the Beatles spent two days making promotional films for the "Paperback Writer" single. The first set of clips was filmed at EMI Studio 1 on 19 May by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, director of the popular TV show Ready Steady Go! The following day, the group shot further clips for the two songs in the grounds of Chiswick House, in west London. In the face of fans' complaints of an aloofness in their new work, however, the band conceded to making a live appearance on Top of the Pops on 16 June.
The camaraderie among the four Beatles was at its highest throughout this period. A disagreement between McCartney and his bandmates nevertheless resulted in McCartney walking out of the studio during the final session, for Lennon's "She Said She Said", on 21 June, two days before the band were due to fly to West Germany for the first leg of their world tour. The Beatles spent over 220 hours recording Revolver – a figure that excludes mixing sessions, and compares with less than 80 hours for Rubber Soul. Final mixing of the album took place on 22 June. The Beatles celebrated the project's completion by attending the opening of Sibylla's, a nightclub in which Harrison had a financial stake.
Production techniques Studio aesthetic