Revolver (11) is the seventh studio album by the English band the Beatles. It was released in August 1966, accompanied by the double A-side single “Eleanor Rigby”/”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 from 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 chart in the UK for seven weeks and the US Billboard 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.
The cover for Revolver was created by German-born bassist and artist Klaus Voormann, one of the Beatles’ oldest friends from their time in Hamburg during the early 1960s. Voormann’s artwork was part line drawing and part collage, using photographs mostly taken over 1964–65 by Robert Freeman. In his line drawings of the four Beatles, Voormann drew inspiration from the work of the nineteenth-century illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, who was the subject of a long-running exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 1966 and highly influential on fashion and design themes of the time. Voormann placed the various photos within the tangle of hair that connects the four faces. Turner writes that the drawings show each Beatle “in another state of consciousness”, such that the older images appear to be tumbling out from them.
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 author Ian Inglis, Revolver is widely viewed as “the album on which Harrison came of age as a songwriter”. Rodriguez writes that, whereas most contemporary acts shy away from attempting a concept album in the vein of Sgt. Pepper, the prototype established by Revolver, whereby an album serves as an “eclectic collection of diverse songs”, continues to influence modern popular music. He characterises Revolver as “the Beatles’ artistic high-water mark” and says that, unlike Sgt. Pepper, it was the product of a collaborative effort, with “the group as a whole being fully vested in creating Beatle music”
Revolver expanded the boundaries of pop music, revolutionised standard practices in studio recording, advanced principles espoused by the 1960’s counterculture, and inspired the development of psychedelic rock, electronica, progressive rock and world music. 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 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. It has been certified double platinum by the BPI and 5x platinum by the RIAA.
