Listen to the 50-minute version of The Beatles song ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’
For years, Revolver was sitting in the shadows of the albums that followed, like the self-titled ‘White Album’, The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road.
But, with the passage of time, Revolver became something of a sleeper hit and is now considered perhaps one of the best Beatles albums of all time. “It was really something of a hidden gem until [the 1980s],” recalls The Beatles’ biographer Mark Lewisohn. “Sgt. Pepper had the effect of casting the other albums into shadow because it was so huge. But then suddenly it became a cool thing to say you thought Revolver was their best album, and suddenly it picked up notice that it hadn’t had before the 1980s”.
In 2016, some 50 years later, Revolver was already largely appreciated as one of the defining parts of The Beatles’ legacy. A milestone as vast as the 50th anniversary opened up the doors to a new wave of reflection about what made the record so great.
Artistically and logistically, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ stands today as a song that very much defined the band’s capability during a time when resources were few. Its sound and production were collectively very much a lesson in technology and, listening back, that much is clear.
With the ingenuity of tape loops, one of Paul McCartney’s innovations, the mesmerising pulse of Ringo Starr’s drums sets the song’s foundation. George Harrison’s sitar drone gracefully hovers like a perfumed cloud while John Lennon’s captivating vocals emerge, and it all becomes evident that we are witnessing a band operating at the pinnacle of their talents. “What kind of a mind can create something like this?” said Lewisohn.
He added: “Even now, it’s one of those recordings that in still, 50 years on, stops you in your tracks. What confidence they had in their ability. What scope they had in the vision of where music could go”.
To commemorate the album’s 50th anniversary, solo artist, producer, and remixer Andrew Liles released a 50-minute version of the song called ‘50 Minutes of Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles for 50 Years’. Running longer than the entirety of the Revolver album, Liles’ extended version might just say more about the band’s lasting endurance than the song itself.
When announcing the rework, Liles wrote: “On the 5th of August 2016, Revolver will be 50 years old. Revolver is arguably the first mainstream pop album to explore esoteric themes, ‘exotic’ instrumentation and use the studio as a tool to create otherworldly unimagined sounds”.
He added: “It’s an album that rewrote the rules and laid the foundations for audioscopic cosmonauts like myself to venture deeper into uncharted universes of sound. We have the fab five (how can we forget George Martin) to thank for opening new possibilities and new dimensions. Without their innovation the world of sound would be a lot less colourful”.
Listen to the 50-minute version of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ below.
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