The White Album: A Doll's House

My favourite Beatles album is The Beatles which is also known as The White Album. The best book about the band is Revolution In The Head by the music journalist Ian MacDonald, who is now dead and sorely missed (he also wrote the brilliant and influential The New Shostakovich). MacDonald had a gift for finding fresh insights whilst travelling well trodden paths and instead of my waffle about The Beatles here is an excerpt from Revolution In The Head that gives a summary of the artistic ambience of the The White Album;

"With it's thirty varied and variable tracks, The Beatles is a sprawling affair reflecting the group's post-Epstein indifference to corporate concerns. That it hangs together as well as it does is a tribute to the sequencing skills of Lennon, McCartney, and George Martin, who worked out the running order in a continuous 24-hour effort on 16th-17th October 1968 (The Beatles' longest single session). With it's mood contrasts, cunning key-sequences, and clever segues, this 95-minute double-album is a masterpiece of programming. Mere expert presentation, however, cannot hide the fact that half the tracks on it are poor by earlier standards, or that many of it's lyrics are little more than the lazy navel-gazing of pampered recluses.

Before the Leicester group Family issued their debut LP Music in a Doll's House in August 1968, The Beatles had been planning to call their work A Doll's House (supposedly after Ibsen). The clash was unfortunate since this was an apt title for this musical attic of odds and ends, some charming, others sinister, many tinged with childhood memories, all absorbed in the interior worlds of their authors. There is a secret unease in this music, betraying the turmoil beneath the group's business-as-usual facade. Shadows lengthen over the album as it progresses: the long slow afternoon of The Beatles' career. Sadly, none of this is captured in Richard Hamilton's modishly empty sleeve-design. One can only assume that this is because he wasn't able to hear the music before setting to work, since it's crepuscular quality is so tangible. Certainly no other product of the noon-bright idiom of Sixties pop offers as many associations of guardeed privacy and locked rooms, or concludes in such disturbing dreamlike darkness."