Credit: Far Out / Alamy

“It didn’t work”: The Beatles albums that embarrassed John Lennon

Thu 20 March 2025 19:14, UK

For many artists, there are no two words more damaging to their integrity than “selling out”. As much as people might like to fill every stadium that they can for years on end, not holding onto one’s core sound and playing whatever the charts want is an easy way to lose fans over the years, to the point where artists sound like a completely different group than the one that started their career. Although John Lennon thrived on taking chances whenever he was with The Beatles, he knew that many albums weren’t worth releasing.

Granted, when talking about Lennon’s problem with The Beatles, it’s easy to take a lot of them with several grains of salt. Lennon was always critical of every move the Fab Four made, and even though there were some solid-gold classics in the mix like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, there were always going to be times when Lennon thought he could have done some tracks better than what he ended up doing.

But when it comes to albums, the band’s legacy was already a mess before they got to the end of their career. After all, the American market took a long time to catch up to what they were doing on the other side of the Atlantic, and even though they eventually turned around and started selling their albums, the Americanised albums like Meet The Beatles and The Beatles’ Second Album was practically a spit in the face to how the band wanted their records to sound like.

Although the British version of their work has been considered canon, there were still some loose ends that needed tying up when they first broke apart. Paul McCartney’s self-titled debut was already in the works, but considering the band’s troubled history, having them release Let It Be in its raw form made them all look like bitter old friends who couldn’t wait to be rid of each other.

As any industry imbecile will tell you, though, it’s all about the bottom dollar, and since Allen Klein single-handedly pit Lennon and McCartney against each other, the least he could do was crank out as much music as he could under the band’s name. He already had control over every Beatle except for Macca, but he knew the best way to get the money rolling in was to enter the realm of greatest hits records.

Despite the famous Red and Blue albums having a good portion of the band’s finest work, Lennon would have easily forgotten the whole thing if he could have, saying, “I just presumed that they would just copy them from the masters and put them out. I didn’t even listen to it until it was out. I took it back, and I played it, and it was embarrassing. Some fool had tried to make it stereo and it didn’t work. If you try to fake it, you lose the guts of it. The fast version of ‘Revolution’ was destroyed.”

And while Lennon wasn’t alive to see the next generation of Beatles recordings meet the digital age, the initial remixes weren’t much better. The band always intended for their first albums to be made in mono, and for anyone who grew up listening exclusively to streaming services, it’s hard to go back to many of those early records based on their 2009 remastered versions and hear everything separated in the mix.