New Beatles 1 vinyl edition

2015 vinyl edition of “Beatles 1” with contents.

The new vinyl edition of “Beatles 1” has finally shown up on Amazon, and this picture of the contents of the package shows that four photo prints of the famous psychedelic Beatles portraits by Richard Avedon will be among the included goodies, alongside the singles sleeves poster and the special inner sleeve, also depicting singles covers from around the world.

Poster depicting singles sleeves from around the world.

This is exactly as it looks like in my collection, but mine is an original from 2001 on EMI. Universal Music released their equivalent as late as December last year, so this new edition may seem to be quite superfluous. It has however been released in order to update the records so that they now contain the new stereo mixes by Giles Martin and Sam Okell.

For a while though, Martin and Okell thought they were only going to provide the new mixes for the DVD/Blu-ray collection, it seems that adding the CD to the package, and updating it with the new stereo mixes was a late decision, possibly made even after the release of the remastered “Beatles 1” on vinyl in December 2014. Probably, Universal reckoned that by making it a CD with bonus DVDs, it would be eligible to enter the records charts. Hence, they deviced a plan to do an update of the “1” album with the new stereo mixes to justify releasing it again, so shortly after it was released remastered on CD in 2011, and remastered on vinyl last year.

The vinyl edition of the album was only released in the UK initially, but has been available as import from the UK elsewhere in the world. The 2014 vinyl release was manufactured in Holland, according to small transparent stickers on the shrink wrap. What’s especially nice about the vinyl edition of this album is that each of the four sides represents appropriately different styles and phases of The Beatles’ career. Side 1 is Mersey Beat, side 2 is folk-rock/pre-psychedelic style,  side 3 is purely experimental/psychedelic style and side 4 is back-to-basics/rock style.

“Beatles 1” on vinyl will be released on December 4, 2015.