December 6, 2018
Album cover of Anthology 1, the first of three compilation albums released alonside The Beatles Anthology documentary and book in 1995. The albums contained the ‘best of’ The Beatles, and the documentary and book portrayed the history of the band.
The original album may be over, but the remastered version includes 77 bonus tracks and demos for songs the band was recording at the time, for the White Album and other releases. The 2018 super deluxe ended up being five hours and 27 minutes long.
The first 27 are labeled “the Esher Demos,” and the story behind them is that the band wanted to create very sophisticated demos for the album, and, going to George Harrison’s house to record them, they recorded 27 demos for every song up to “Cry Baby Cry.”
While most demos are quite crude, these demos include double track vocals and many of the instruments that show up on the album. Really, the only thing missing from the demos is the studio production value.
The last 50 songs are much like the Beatles Anthology series, in that they are all just early takes of some of their later songs. It isn’t possible to explain each song individually in this article and retain sanity, so the best way to understand how the Beatles worked in their studio is to listen yourself.
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