The Beatles: The Capitol Albums Vol. 1 (Capitol)

The Yanks were not interested in British bands in 1963; Cliff Richard, Tony Sheridan, and the rest had bombed when their highly successful English releases were launched upon the U.S. So when EMI offered the Beatles to American labels, you could have built the Berlin Wall out of their indifference. Only Chicago indie label Vee-Jay was brave enough to show interest.

Meanwhile, producer George Martin and the Fab Four were crafting carefully constructed and perfectly paced albums for the English market. In the days when LPs were usually a hit single or two padded out with slapdash filler, the Beatles knew they were doing something finer and better, and put as much work into arranging their full-lengths as they did on any given single. Then came The Ed Sullivan Show, the conquest of America, and suddenly Capitol Records was interested.

Capitol bought the rights to all the tracks that had been recorded to date and decided to diddle a bit with the order the Beatles had worked out for their albums. Thus, as all fans know, the first four Capitol albums were each slightly different from their English equivalents.

In recent times, when the Beatles' LPs were converted to CD, the surviving members of the band insisted on the versions released in Britain. According to the booklet you get with The Beatles: The Capitol Albums Vol. 1, this has left U.S. and Canadian fans all distraught that they could not get digital versions exactly reproducing the vinyl they had listened to in their youth. So Capitol has put onto CD format its versions of Meet the Beatles, The Beatles' Second Album, Something New, and Beatles '65.

The fun in owning The Capitol Albums is that each recording is first presented in remastered stereo, then in the original mono that it had to be formatted in to play on the majority of record players people owned in 1964. It gives you a chance to appreciate Martin's production talent. In mono, the handclaps that punctuate "I Want to Hold Your Hand" are dead centre in the mix; in the remastered stereo version they are weirdly and extremely over to one side as if someone had been standing and clapping at the studio door.

Stereo or mono, this is one fine reissue of the songs that burst the Beatles into the world and made them the legends that they are. We can only hope the future will give us music so fresh and alive.