The 1965 album John Lennon crowned as The Beatles’ first major leap forward: “We took over the studio”
Few fans will disagree that 1965 was the crucial year when The Beatles began looking beyond the Fab Four.
Not that Beatlemania wasn’t in full swing. Liverpool’s little Merseybeat outfit was enjoying the feverish peaks of their global pop conquering, thrust by the previous two years of repeated smash hits across both sides of the Atlantic and seeing an exhaustive amount of shows from Blackpool to Kowloon. In 1965, Help! saw The Beatles’ second outing on the silver screen, and their live whirlwind reached the iconic heights of August’s mammoth and record-breaking Shea Stadium show.
However, any fans paying attention would have noticed the giant leaps being made on record. By the end of the year, every Beatle had taken LSD and experienced its mind-expanding trips, and an embrace of Bob Dylan’s folk revivalism was lending a hand to the Help! soundtrack’s most essential numbers, ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’, ‘It’s Only Love’, and the immortal ‘Yesterday’, flexing songwriting ambitions already restlessly shaking off their manicured, moptop marketing.
Five albums brought The Beatles greater confidence in the studio, and the surrounding counterculture’s artistic and chemical influences were pushing the band’s work into new, leftfield territory. The seeds sown on Help! began blooming in earnest in October that year, when the sessions for LP number six started after their second US tour across the summer, and full of ideas as to how to realise the new sounds floating across the band’s songwriting pen.
“We were just getting better, technically and musically, that’s all,” John Lennon reflected to Rolling Stone in 1970. “Finally, we took over the studio. In the early days, we had to take what we were given – we didn’t know how you can get more bass. We were learning the technique on Rubber Soul. We were more precise about making the album, that’s all. And we took over the cover and everything.”
It’s typically the point where fans mark the beginning of their second half. Released in December 1965 and supported by the ‘We Can Work It Out’ / ‘Day Tripper’ double A-side, Rubber Soul expands its sonic palette and lyrical dimensions, paving the way for the LP opuses around the corner.
Introspection, reflective wanderings, and ambiguous confessions shine starkly on cuts like ‘Girl’ and ‘Nowhere Man’, and the intrepid instrumentation guiding ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’s sitar or the whimsical baroque break on ‘In My Life’, pursuing arrangements unconcerned with live reproduction on stage.
The album as an artistic experience was taking shape. Aside from their MBE collection and one TV spot for Granada Television, The Beatles were able to fully commit to the Rubber Soul sessions without any other touring, radio, or filming obligations, which freed up creative efforts to consider the record as a cohesive entity over a mere LP collation of numbers, and George Martin’s former EMI bigwig producer role began to rub shoulders with a confident band who had their own ideas on how the album should sound.
It was a watershed moment. Rubber Soul would top the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and anticipate the touring fatigue blocking The Beatles’ artistic ambitions across 1966, before the following year’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band marked their visionary pop genius. The road travelled was sparked by 1965’s Rubber Soul, the moment when the music world knew the Fab Four camp was set to stand as the decade’s premier composers.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.