Yellow Submarine (album)

• 1. Introduction

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  Yellow Submarine arrived in record stores in January 1969 with a peculiar distinction: the Beatles themselves did not consider it a significant release. It was their tenth studio album, and by the time it came out, the band had already moved on. The sprawling double LP everyone knows as the White Album had landed two months earlier, and Yellow Submarine felt, to its own creators, like an obligation being discharged rather than a statement being made.

  The story of how this album got made raises questions that cut to the heart of what the Beatles were at this moment in their career. How does a band that had just produced Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band approach a project they actively did not want to make? What happens when contractual duty collides with genuine creative disinterest? And what does it mean that some of those reluctantly assembled tracks turned out to be genuinely strange and powerful pieces of music? The answers reveal a band operating in an unusual mode - one that left behind a release unlike anything else in their catalogue.

• 2. The Obligation

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  The Beatles owed United Artists a third film. That was the core of it. Their three-picture deal required one more entry, and after the experience of Help!, the band had no appetite for another live-action production. An animated film offered a way out. It would fulfill the contract while requiring minimal involvement from the four men themselves. They reluctantly agreed to supply four new songs, and that was essentially the extent of their commitment.

  Author Ian MacDonald, writing about this period, described the band's approach as a "regime of continuous low-intensity recording" that carried "a workaday quality about it - an intrinsic lack of tension which was bound to colour the resulting material." The Yellow Submarine soundtrack formed part of this phase, alongside the music for the Magical Mystery Tour television film. The band had completed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in April 1967 and showed minimal enthusiasm for what followed.

  The animated film Yellow Submarine had its worldwide premiere in London in July 1968, by which time the Beatles were deep in the sessions for the White Album. After actually watching the finished film, the band's attitude shifted somewhat - they became more willing to associate themselves with it publicly. But the album itself had already been recorded under the shadow of that earlier indifference, and the release was deliberately delayed to avoid competing with the White Album, and also to allow time for George Martin's orchestral contributions to be properly re-recorded.

• 3. Songs From the Margins

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  George Harrison's "Only a Northern Song" was the first of the new tracks to exist, taped in February 1967. It had been submitted for Sgt. Pepper and rejected. In April, immediately after the stereo mixes for that album were completed, the group returned to add overdubs - what Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn called "a curious session" - layering in trumpet, glockenspiel, and spoken voices. Harrison's lyrics addressed his specific frustration at being a contracted songwriter to the Beatles' publishing company, Northern Songs, a company he had no meaningful stake in.

  "All Together Now" took a single session on the 12th of May 1967. Paul McCartney had borrowed the title from a phrase he remembered hearing as a child, a prompt to join in on music hall songs. He later called the track "a throwaway". By contrast, Harrison's "It's All Too Much", recorded in late May 1967 at De Lane Lea Studios in central London, ran to over eight minutes in its original form. Inspired by LSD experimentation, it carries the Summer of Love philosophy of 1967 and leans heavily on guitar feedback. The track quotes a trumpet passage from Jeremiah Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March" and borrows a lyric from the Merseys' 1966 hit "Sorrow".

  John Lennon's "Hey Bulldog" came last among the new tracks, recorded on the 11th of February 1968. Its origins were almost accidental - the band had gathered to shoot a promotional film for the single "Lady Madonna", and the session evolved into something else. The track's ending extended beyond the intended fade-out point into a jam session, and that unplanned extension was kept in the finished version. Lennon later described it as "a good-sounding record that means nothing".

• 4. Martin's Contribution

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  Side 2 of the album belongs entirely to George Martin. Over two three-hour sessions on the 22nd and the 23rd of October 1968 at Abbey Road, a 41-piece orchestra re-recorded selections from the symphonic score Martin had composed for the animated film. The recordings were then edited down to their final LP length on the 22nd of November.

  Martin's score drew widely on the classical tradition. Author Ian MacDonald identified quotations from and allusions to Bach, Stravinsky, Mozart, and Webern woven through the selections. "Sea of Monsters" opens with Bach's Air on the G String. "Sea of Time" contains what MacDonald describes as "an affectionate quotation" from the Indian-styled "Within You Without You", the Harrison track from Sgt. Pepper. Martin also worked in a reprise of the film's title song in "Yellow Submarine in Pepperland". These were not casual references; Martin was threading his own score into dialogue with the band's wider body of work.

  Lennon's later verdict on Martin's contributions was blunt. He dismissed the orchestral side as "all this terrible shit" and blamed Brian Epstein, the Beatles' former manager, for allowing Martin's involvement. But author Peter Doggett explained the practical constraint: neither an EP of just the new Beatles songs nor an expanded soundtrack was viable at the time, because both options would have denied Martin his contractual right to appear on the release - and deprived him of what Doggett described as "potentially the largest royalty payment of his career".

• 5. The Release and Its Reception

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  Apple Records issued Yellow Submarine on the 13th of January 1969 in the United States and on the 17th of January in the United Kingdom. The album appeared in stereo only in the US; the UK pressing offered both stereo and mono, though the mono version was a fold-down rather than a dedicated mix. In the US, 8-track tape and cassette versions added "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" as an additional track, since it was also heard in the film.

  The album peaked at number 3 in the United Kingdom and number 2 in the United States - one of the few Beatles releases to miss the top spot in both countries. Canada was an exception. Yellow Submarine topped the RPM national albums chart for two weeks, ending the White Album's twelve-week run at number 1. On the American Billboard Top LPs chart, it was the White Album that blocked it from the top position as well.

  Contemporary critics were divided but rarely enthusiastic about the album as a whole. Beat Instrumental lamented the small quantity of new Beatles material, though the reviewer singled out Harrison's two contributions as "superb pieces". A reviewer in Record Mirror predicted it would provoke ecstasy among fans worldwide and called Martin's side a "tremendous achievement". Writing decades later, Pitchfork Media's Mark Richardson concluded that "the Yellow Submarine soundtrack is like the work of a supremely talented band that couldn't really be bothered", while singling out "Hey Bulldog" as "a tough and funky piano-driven rocker" and "by a good margin the best song here".

• 6. The Album That Almost Wasn't

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  Before the album came out, there had been a different plan. An EP containing only the four new songs had been considered for release in September 1968, but that idea was shelved to make way for the White Album. After the full soundtrack album finally appeared and drew mild criticism for offering so little new Beatles material across a full LP, the band revisited the EP concept. They decided to issue a five-track mono EP without the film score, and to include the then-unreleased "Across the Universe" as a bonus track. The running order was settled and the EP was mastered in March 1969.

  It was never released. The legal and contractual constraints that Doggett later outlined meant that excluding Martin's music would have cost Martin his rightful place alongside the Beatles - and a substantial royalty. NME critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler, writing in their 1975 book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, bemoaned the commercial circumstances that had produced a full soundtrack album, arguing that the four new tracks "would have made a superb EP". AllMusic's Richie Unterberger later echoed that view directly, writing that the album "would have been far better value if it had been released as a four-song EP... with the addition of a bonus track in 'Across the Universe'." Those mono mixes for the EP were not heard publicly until 2009, when they appeared on the Mono Masters collection within the box set The Beatles in Mono.

• 7. Covers, Notes, and Afterlives

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  The album's cover art was drawn by Heinz Edelman, based on the poster design created for the film's trailers. The UK and US pressings shared the same basic illustration, but the UK jacket added the words "Nothing Is Real", borrowed from the lyric of "Strawberry Fields Forever", printed below the album title. The back cover differed more substantially between territories. The UK pressing reprinted a White Album review from The Observer, written by Tony Palmer and introduced by Apple press officer Derek Taylor. The US pressing ran a fictitious illustrated biography of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, written by Dan Davis, in which the ensemble's fictional battle with the Blue Meanies was set alongside three episodes from English-language history: Beowulf's struggle at the Heorot mead hall, King John's signing of Magna Carta, and Thomas Jefferson's drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

  The album's first compact disc release appeared in August 1987, consistent with the British LP configuration. It returned the album to the UK charts, where it peaked at number 60. A more substantial rethinking arrived on the 13th of September 1999, when Yellow Submarine Songtrack was released to mark the film's 30th anniversary. It dropped Martin's orchestral side entirely and added nine songs from the film's soundtrack that had not appeared on the original album, all newly remixed. The 1999 release remains the version that most completely represents the Beatles' own music as it appeared in the animated film. PopMatters critic David Gassman wrote that "the otherwise unavailable songs on this album ought to be part of any thinking Beatles fan's collection," suggesting the original album still had a case to make for itself, even after the Songtrack rendered much of it optional.