Artist
The Beatles
The Beatles appears 8 times in our Merseybeat, Psychedelic Rock, Musique Concrète, and Twice Over lists, placing as high as No. 1. Hand-curated, with a reason for every pick.
- Ranked entries
- 8
- Appears on
- Merseybeat, Psychedelic Rock, Musique Concrète, and Twice Over
- Years
- 1963–1968
- Highest placing
- No. 1 in Merseybeat
- Updated
- 2026-08-31
Appears on
She Loves You
1963 · Parlophone
Ranked No. 1 in Merseybeat
The best-selling British single of the sixties, and structurally strange — it opens on the chorus and ends on a sixth chord George Martin thought was corny. Two years from Hamburg to this.
Also on Twice Over
Tomorrow Never Knows
1966 · Parlophone
Ranked No. 1 in Psychedelic Rock
One chord, five tape loops, a drum pattern lifted from nowhere and a vocal sent through a rotating speaker. The most radical thing on any pop record of the decade, at the end of side two.
Also on Twice Over
Please Please Me
1963 · Parlophone
Ranked No. 2 in Merseybeat
Originally a Roy Orbison-style ballad, sped up at Martin's suggestion until it became something else. The harmonica and the shared vocal are the whole Merseybeat formula in two minutes.
Twist and Shout
1963 · Parlophone
Ranked No. 7 in Merseybeat
Recorded last on the final take of a fourteen-hour day with Lennon's voice already gone. The damage is the performance, and it could not be repeated.
Revolution 9
1968 · Apple
Ranked No. 8 in Musique Concrète
Tape loops and a repeated announcement, on the best-selling record in the world. However you rate it, it put twenty years of studio experiment into millions of houses at once.
Also on Twice Over
She Loves You
1963 · Parlophone
Picked by Twice Over
The most efficient two minutes in the ranking it sits in — a band still young enough to think the job was to make somebody scream. Nothing here predicts either of the next two entries, which is precisely why they are worth putting beside it.
Also on Merseybeat
Tomorrow Never Knows
1966 · Parlophone
Picked by Twice Over
Three years on from a handclap-and-harmony single: one chord, a tape loop orchestra and a vocal fed through a rotating speaker. The gap between this and the entry above is the shortest distance any artist here travels between two of our rankings.
Also on Psychedelic Rock
Revolution 9
1968 · Apple
Picked by Twice Over
A tape collage on the best-selling record of its decade, sitting in our musique concrète ranking beside people who spent their lives in institutional studios. Whether it is good is genuinely arguable. That it is the thing itself, in the charts, is not.
Also on Musique Concrète