The Beatles albums that battled for 1960s chart supremacy
We can’t help but indulge in partisanship, can we?
Even in music, a famously subjective art form, we have to find a way to satiate our human spirit and turn it tribal. It’s why we can’t just enjoy the greatest band to have ever existed and instead, constantly ask, ‘Which Beatle do you prefer, John Lennon or Paul McCartney?’
But maybe we are asking the wrong question. Perhaps the great division between Beatles fans isn’t that of their preferred songwriter but the album instead. Across their 13 studio albums, there are plenty of distinct sonic identities to choose from. There is the boy-next-door innocence of Please Please Me, the empathy of Help!, the intrigue of Revolver and the pure expanse of The White Album. And of course, those all exist without mentioning the two most obvious picks.
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road stand as the two epitomic Beatles albums. Both showcase the band at their absolute peak, with the former being their premier experimental concept piece, acting as the moment they broke out of their commercial shell and became the groundbreaking band that would define centuries to come.
The latter was the culmination of that trend. The outcome of the Sgt Pepper explosion, where esoterica was aligned with masterful musicianship. More than that, it welcomes in the single writing of their early years, with the A-side being a non-stop whistle tour of endless hits and the B-side being a symphonic second-half medley that conceptualises fragments into one cohesive epic statement.
So, which album sold more, Sgt Pepper or Abbey Road?
Well, it was only Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which outsold Abbey Road in the 1960s.
The ‘69 epic sold a total of 16.9 million copies upon its release, while Sgt Pepper outshone it with a total of 18.3m copies. It’s an objective victory for the ‘67 album and gives weight to those in the Sgt Pepper camp, that their preferred album is, in fact, the greatest.
Moreover, if you were inclined to hitch this argument to the more gritty one of Lennon vs McCartney, then Sgt Pepper’s victory will also add to that. It was well known that the ‘67 album was his baby, and he fearlessly, and at times brutally, led the band into music immortality.
“We wanted to see what we could do, see how far we could stretch pop music. Realise our visions of how far out a record could be,” McCartney said of the record.
Lennon would later say that he preferred The White Album to Macca’s masterpiece, proving just how unaligned their creative viewpoints were becoming. As a record, Abbey Road actually showcased that, for Lennon willingly admitted to liking the A-side but then called McCartney’s medley on the second half “junk” and “bits of songs thrown together”.
But that’s ultimately what makes Abbey Road such a perfect album. It’s the sound of imperfection, a band fracturing at the seams yet somehow finding a way to forge the tension into sonic greatness. It’s a record that tells a million personal stories, while still celebrating the one consistent story of their shared musical genius.
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