My One-Disc White Album...

6:00 AM GMT 28/07/2008

Stand-in George Martin: Andrew Male
Day job: MOJO Deputy Editor
Alternative album title: The Little Black & White Album

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The Black Tar Side
Cheap, sneering, stomping ’68 Beatles, all on one side!

1. Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey
A similar riff kicks off The Rolling Stones’ greatest one-disc album (Sticky Fingers) so why not this for The Beatles greatest one-disc album?

2. Birthday
And why let up now? This is all about the raw and riffing Beatles, complete with Ringo’s best ever caveman drum-slugging.

3. Glass Onion
…perfectly complemented by the blunt-instrument intro of this punk sneer Lennon assault.

4. Back In The USSR
Just in case those woozy strings at the end have caused you to nod off, it’s time to pick things up again...

5. Happiness Is A Warm Gun
Dark, gnomic and weird, with Lennon’s horrible kazoo guitar at 0:44, this one belongs on the bad side.

6. Revolution 1
After “bang, bang, shoot, shoot” where else but here?

7. Helter Skelter
“When I got to the bottom I go back to the top…” This killer track should always have been at the end of side one, before you flip the record and the world changes

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The White Powder Side
Bucolic, love-struck and in the arms of morphia, ’68 Beatles at their most dream-like.

1. Mother Nature's Son
This cyclical, melancholy mood piece is the perfect scene-setter for side two and as up as it gets in the Beatles magical dream world…

2. Julia
…Lennon loses himself in the ocean of his own past…

3. Blackbird
McCartney finds himself in the country night…

4. I'm So Tired
…Lennon typically breaks this mood of meditation with a sarky gripe

5. Long, Long, Long
…but Harrison communes with the mystical forces of mediation

6. I Will
…so it’s time for a simple love song

7. Cry Baby Cry
A complex nursery rhyme… after which McCartney’s “can you take me back” segues perfectly into the ghostly child’s farewell of...

8. Good Night
…the only ending that this album could ever feel right with…

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 28/07/2008

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