I echo your senitments, but to me 'A Hard Days Night' was when the boys became men; writing all the tracks and performed brimming with confidence

Abbey Road, Pepper, Revolver, Rubber Soul, AHDN and The White Album are way ahead of PPM in the queue to True Fabness.

seems to change constantly with regards The Beatles' 'Best LP'.

Through the 70s and 80s Sgt Pepper was considered their masterpiece.

In the mid 90s, coincidentally my college years and britpop, Revolver
was 'the' definitive album.

Abbey Road seems to have been most people's pick in the noughties and I now sense that AHDN is going to be this decade's pick.

Like most things involving the Beatles, it's difficult to get a consensus.

PPM for me at least, remains the most exciting album of all the HJH output. It's still so fresh and so thrilling!

...but the Beatles album I enjoy listening to most is Help!.

and just loved it. For all their later musical accomplishments and refinements, they never again sounded like they did on their debut, which was four young blokes having an absolute whale of a time in a proper recording studio.

I'm a White Album man meself... but I've always had a fondness for Please Please Me.. Theres a real freshness to it and it's amazing how they banged it out in a day.. tho I think "With The Beatles" is far superior..and Hard Days Night tops that etc etc etc....

......agree.
The Fabs' Rock n' Roll album.

but I was surprised how strong it was. I actually prefer the stereo version, maybe because I was born into a stereo world and mono has no sentimental value for me. The recently remastered Twist and Shout has a clarity and power that is breathtaking.

But their best album? Nah. Abbey Rd, Revolver, AHDN and Help are better. I imagine if I was alive when it was released it might be different.

Funnily enough I dug Revolver out this weekend. It is a greatest hits album.

The only neg on it is that some songs are so overplayed, you don't feel like listening to them. Definitely their high spot for me.

But it's not close to being the Beatles at the height of their powers. For me it's A Hard Day's Night, Pepper, Revolver and Abbey Road. I can't really choose between those, because they all represent such different things.

They got a lot done in seven years, eh?

is unlikely, I'm voting for "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones" right here.

As for Beatles albums, I never make a choice because I don't have to. I love 'em all, like one big album.

On the whole my preference is for The White Album and Abbey Road, but it has to be said that on their later LPs, the HJHs always had at least one song which was just completely fecking awful. You can't really say that about the early stuff (even A Taste Of Honey, which I think is just the wrong song for the band, doesn't plumb the depths of, say, Rocky Raccoon).

worth, love both Revolver and Abbey Road, but all time fave fabs is still Hard Day's Night. To think they wrote and produced it in such a relatively short period of time is still mind boggling. I'm going to have a cup of tea and a biscuit and put it on now.

By coincidence I just listened to Please Please Me again the other day, and it really is a great little album. One thing that struck me is that while Twist & Shout has always gotten a lot of attention as a great closer (and rightly so, on the remaster you can practically hear John's voice coming apart as he gives it his all), it's the opening track that is the best on the record. It just explodes off the album and makes you want to move. It's the best dance tune they ever did.

PPM isn't my favorite Beatles record (that would be The White Album, Abbey Road, and Help) but I think it's more diverse than AHDN, which starts strong and ends weak. Side 1 of AHDN (from A Hard Day's Night to Can't Buy Me Love) is perfection but Side 2 of that album has a sameness that makes it kind of less interesting for me.

Mainly for the variety of material - this was only a few years after being Mop Tops but "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" would have had the teenyboppers running for cover. Plus the Fabs looked so cool in the colour photos in it...

Never understood the acclaim.

Half baked, self indulgent solo track twaddle with few redeeming features.

Not a patch on Abbey Road or, whisper it softly, Let It Be.

so I've just put it on.
I bet there are plenty of bands who wish *their* worst album was as good as this.
Two Of Us
Across The Universe
One After 909
The Long And Winding Road
Get Back

It's still Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road for me, but still...

The early plinky plonk stuff is not a patch on the later more picturesque and moving stuff. The later albums are better melodically for one thing, and in so many ways. "Plinky Plonk" incidentally is a technical description. A commercial approach much copied by bands all over the word in the late 60's, normally accompanied rather cynically with a vacant look of optimism and a syrupy wink.

Of course they were more happy to be commercial in the early years, and this by its nature perhaps appeals to the shallower souls of the world.

Now that I could agree with.

It's Revolver for me. I just think it encapsulates everything that was great about The Beatles, from children's songs to sounds that took the average listener somewhere they'd never been before.

And I can't play A Hard Day's Night without being hurled back to queuing around the block at the Odeon in Pilgrim Street, Newcastle, nine-year-old hand firmly gripped in Mam's, then sitting surrounded by screaming Geordie lasses as Beatle-world unfolded on the screen.

...is one of the few HJH's tracks I would never play of choice. 'Mr Moonlight' similarly. Apart from that, the poster above who said 'it's like one long album' is right. I think I've said it before here, but I envy anyone discovering the Beatles' music for the first time. Fave album 'Revolver', though the White Album was almost as devastating in its impact on the 14-year-old me. But some of the 'deep cuts' (as our friends across the pond might say) are often the best - 'The Night Before', 'Every Little Thing', 'Little Child', 'Hold Me Tight', 'I'll Cry Instead' (I'm smiling as I hear George's fills in my head - perfect)... hmm, I'll stop myself before I list everything bar 'Tell Me Why' and 'Mr Moonlight'... ;-p

They will never be surpassed, taking my 10 year old to see the bootleg beatles as he is a massive fan. No other band can cross the generations with such ease.

not only of PPM but the time - as Philip Larkin put it so wonderfully:
''Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.''

who is left rather cold by "Abbey Road"? It has its moments, but I really think they're few and far between. "I Want You" is self-indulgent twaddle of the worst kind. Lennon's creativity seems to have evaporated in a mist of drug-use and plagiarism; McCartney whips our a couple of highlights, but the real star of the album is George Harrison.

To steal a phrase used to describe Billie Holiday's last album, I think of it more as flowers sprouting in a graveyard than a downright classic. I know I'm in a definite minority, but I'd take "Beatles For Sale" or "Rubber Soul" over "Abbey Road" any day.

were old enough I took them to Abbey Road and we all walked across the zebra crossing holding hands.

Then we went to Savile Row and stood quietly looking up at the rooftop where the Beatles played together in public for the last time.

Now those kids are in their late 20s and they love everything by the Beatles from Please Please Me to Let It Be.

I feel as if I've sucessfully discharged my parental duties.

I have a soft spot for PPM because my dad used to have it on open reel tape (pre-recorded, shop bought tape, I mean) and he would play it on his Bakelite tape player. The tape player had two speeds and occasionally he would play it at the higher speed so it sounded like Alvin & the Chipmunks.

I thought it was hilarious when I was 4 years old.

This is a picture of the Abbey Road crossing (with the studios further along to the right) supposedly taken in September 1969, the day before the LP was released. Before long nothing in this leafy corner of NW London would ever be the same again.

And is that a light-coloured VW Beetle I see under the tree behind the dark Transit van? Could it be.....?

...I prefer the Middle Bit of the Beatles.

The run of Help! -> Rubber Soul -> Revolver...that's a pretty good sequence by anyones standards.

the singles were great, the initial albums quite good, but the way the band were presented at the time, the squealing, the press feeding frenzy, the appearances on Eric+Ernie, etc., well, it wasn't exactly that cool, was it? Not if you were a bit rebellious and what's now called angst-y in the 1960s.

Then they lost the suits, stopped playing live (wise), got druggy, took lots of time in the studio, and changed the game for the whole industry, coming up with Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane/Walrus in quick succession. Sgt.Pepper is still my favourite album of theirs, sonically daring, varied, and still stuffed with good tunes.

They were clearly, even to a 12-year-old, falling apart after that, but still managed to produce albums of high quality. What we didn't know at the time was that they were a one-off, a brilliant phenomenon not to be approached, much less repeated, in the next 40 years.

Yes, it was a privilege to experience them in real time. And yes, I love them dearly and my kids do too. And no, mono doesn't do anything for me, never has.

I'm 56.