Yellow Submarine Review

There is no honest way to grade this as a Beatles album, because barely half of it is one. Side two is George Martin's orchestral score for the film, competently written and entirely disposable outside the cinema. Side one opens with the title track and All You Need Is Love, both already released, and offers four new songs. Of those, Hey Bulldog is genuinely good, a piano riff and a snarling guitar and two men laughing at the end of the take, and it was buried here for decades before people found it.

It's All Too Much is a Harrison drone that goes on for six minutes and has a few good ones in it. Only a Northern Song is Harrison complaining about publishing royalties over a deliberately sour organ, which is funnier as a fact than as a listen. All Together Now is a nursery rhyme. The band knew exactly what this was and treated it accordingly. Buy it for Hey Bulldog and accept that the rest is a soundtrack sleeve with a famous logo on it.