1 (Beatles album)

• 1. Introduction

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  1, the Beatles' greatest hits album released on the 13th of November 2000, arrived exactly thirty years after the band had broken apart. It collected nearly every song the group had sent to the top of the charts in Britain or America, from 1962 through to 1970. Twenty-seven tracks, one disc, and a cover so simple it bordered on brazen: a pop art yellow numeral on a red background, designed by Rick Ward.

  What nobody expected was what happened next. An album of songs that millions of people already owned, by a band that had not recorded together in three decades, would go on to sell over 31 million copies worldwide. It would become the best-selling album of the entire decade of the 2000s, and the fourth-best-selling album in the United States since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales in January 1991. How does a compilation of previously released music become one of the defining commercial events of its era? And what choices, disputes, and quiet editorial decisions shaped which twenty-seven songs made the final cut?

• 2. The Criteria Problem

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  George Martin, who produced the bulk of the Beatles' studio work, compiled the album alongside surviving members Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. The editorial rule was precise: include only those Beatles songs that reached number one on the Record Retailer Top 50 in the United Kingdom or the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. That principle sounds straightforward until you apply it.

  "Please Please Me" was the Beatles' first number one single by almost every measure in Britain, topping the music magazines New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Disc. But it failed to top the Record Retailer chart specifically, and so it was left off. "Strawberry Fields Forever" ran as a double A-side with "Penny Lane"; in the UK, "Penny Lane" reached the top of Melody Maker and peaked at number two in the other charts, blocked by Engelbert Humperdinck's "Release Me". In the US, "Penny Lane" topped the Billboard Hot 100, but "Strawberry Fields Forever" was listed separately and did not. Neither song made the album.

  George Harrison's "For You Blue" charted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 as a B-side to "The Long and Winding Road", but Capitol Records had treated it strictly as a B-side and never promoted it as an A-side. It was excluded. "Day Tripper", released as a double A-side with "We Can Work It Out" in the UK, qualified because both songs topped the Record Retailer chart there; in the US, only "We Can Work It Out" was number one. "Day Tripper" made the cut anyway, on the strength of its UK chart position. Every inclusion was a judgment call, dressed up as a formula.

  One song was added that had been missing from the earlier 1982 compilation 20 Greatest Hits: Harrison's "Something", left off that earlier collection due to time constraints. On 1, it found its place at last, and its presence meant the album drew from both the US and UK versions of that 1982 release.

• 3. The Engineering of Sound

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  Before 1 arrived, all twenty-seven songs had been available on remastered CDs twice over. The first remastering appeared on the Beatles' studio albums released in 1987, along with Past Masters, Volume One and Past Masters, Volume Two in 1988. A second pass produced the CD versions of the 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 compilations in 1993.

  For 1, a third remastering was done specifically for the 2000 release. The liner notes describe the process in technical terms: the original analogue masters were digitally remastered at 24-bit resolution, processed using Sonic Solutions NoNoise technology, and then mastered to 16-bit using Prism SNS Noise Shaping. Peter Mew of Abbey Road Studios oversaw the work, which took place at Abbey Road itself.

  In 2015, Giles Martin took the project further still. His assignment began with the video content for a new deluxe edition, but the work expanded when he realised that his goal of making the audio "more immersive" should also apply to the album itself. He drew a clear distinction between what had been done before and what he was now doing: the earlier remasters had gone back to the final mix tapes, cleaned them up, adjusted the equalisation, and released them. Martin described his own approach as going back further, to the original multi-track masters, and creating entirely new mixes. He said his method was to flip constantly between the previously remastered stereos, the mono remasters, and his new remixes, keeping only what he preferred. The first three tracks on the 2015 release were left in their original mono mixes, as no multi-track masters existed in a form that could be remixed.

• 4. The Package as Artifact

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  Rick Ward's cover gave the album its visual identity: a single large yellow numeral on red, a design so direct it looked almost accidental. That emphasis on a bold numeral went on to influence a wave of similar compilations; ELV1S for Elvis Presley and Number Ones for the Bee Gees both borrowed the visual logic of a prominent digit standing in for a superlative.

  The album's back cover used the famous photographs of the Beatles taken by Richard Avedon, images copyrighted on the 17th of August 1967. The entire package relied on one typeface: Helvetica, in varying weights and sizes throughout.

  The CD came with a 32-page booklet displaying a total of 163 international picture sleeves for the singles, along with recording dates, locations, release dates, and chart statistics for each song. The booklet's first two pages featured a collage of twenty-seven versions of the numeral 1 in different colours, with the phrase "27 No. 1 singles = 1", which served as the promotional tagline for the album. George Martin wrote the foreword.

  Vinyl was pressed only for the United Kingdom. The double vinyl version featured a large full-colour fold-out poster showing 126 picture sleeves, along with reproductions of the four Avedon portraits, which also appeared on the inside of the gatefold cover. The records came with custom inner sleeves and labels designed to match the front cover artwork. The cassette format included a 20-page insert with 36 covers on its inlay reverse. The comprehensive deluxe packaging of the vinyl edition recalled the elaborate presentation of the Beatles' own untitled 1968 album.

• 5. Sales Without Precedent

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  1 became the highest-selling CD of 2000 and, eventually, of the entire decade. By the 18th of December 2000, five weeks after release, Ananova.com was already reporting it as the year's biggest-selling album. In the UK it sold 319,126 copies in a single week, became the Beatles' fifteenth number one album there, and spent nine weeks at the top of the chart, the longest such run in almost ten years. The last album to manage that had been the Eurythmics' Greatest Hits.

  In the United States, 1 debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 during the week of the 2nd of December 2000, with sales totalling over 595,500 copies. Its second week saw sales climb to 662,000, though Backstreet Boys' Black and Blue displaced it with 1.59 million units sold that week. The album returned to the top by the week of the 23rd of December. During the week of the 30th of December it stayed at number one with 823,500 copies sold. The week before Christmas of 2000 produced 1,258,667 copies sold, making it the seventh highest single-week sales figure in SoundScan history, the highest for any album not in its first week, and the highest ever for a compilation of previously released material.

  By the time the album slipped to number four on the 10th of February 2001, it had already sold close to six million units in the US. It spent a total of eight non-consecutive weeks at number one there and 309 weeks inside the Billboard 200. In Canada, it was certified Diamond, denoting one million units, by February 2001, just four months after its release. In Germany it debuted at number one and held there for nine non-consecutive weeks. Worldwide in 2000 alone, it sold 13.8 million copies, finishing the year behind only Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP, Britney Spears' Oops!... I Did It Again, and Santana's Supernatural.

  In 2009, Apple Corps confirmed that worldwide sales had passed 31 million. As of October 2019, US sales stood at 13 million. The album achieved something no artist had done before: making the Beatles the first and only act to hold the best-selling album of two different decades, having also produced the best-selling album of the 1960s with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

• 6. The Album's Shadow

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  1 was the last Beatles album released during George Harrison's lifetime. Harrison died on the 29th of November 2001, just over a year after the album came out. His passing closed a chapter that the album had, in a sense, already been marking: it was released on the thirtieth anniversary of the band's break-up, a round-number reckoning with a catalogue now permanently sealed.

  The commercial scale of 1 made it difficult for other major acts to ignore. Elvis Presley's ELV1S followed in 2002, Michael Jackson's Number Ones in 2003, and the Bee Gees' Number Ones in 2004. The broader wave of compilations that followed included releases from Prince, Pink Floyd, The Who, the Rolling Stones, Nirvana, Elton John, the Beach Boys, and Dean Martin, all appearing between 2001 and 2004. The pop art numeral on a coloured background became a template others reached for.

  In November 2015, Apple Records released 1+, a deluxe edition pairing the remixed audio with fifty promotional films and performances, all digitally restored and enhanced. The most comprehensive edition was a three-disc set combining the album CD with two video discs on Blu-ray or DVD, plus a 124-page hardbound book. McCartney and Starr recorded commentary and introductions for the visual material. Among the footage was the live broadcast of "All You Need Is Love" from Studio One at Abbey Road on the 25th of June 1967, a performance originally staged for the Our World television special, with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, and Graham Nash visible among the guests in the studio.

  The album also arrived too early to include the single "Now and Then", which reached number one on the UK Singles Chart in 2023, more than two decades after 1 was first compiled.