Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties
Cover to the Third Revised Edition (2005)
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| Author | Ian MacDonald |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | The Beatles/The 1960s |
| Publisher |
Fourth Estate (1994, 1997) Pimlico (1995, 1998, 2005) |
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Publication date
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December 1994 2 June 2005 (paperback) |
| Pages | 544 (paperback) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 57750072 |
Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties is a book by British music critic and author Ian MacDonald, discussing the music of the Beatles and the band's relationship to the social and cultural changes of the 1960s. The first edition was published in 1994, with revised editions appearing in 1997 and 2005, the latter following MacDonald's death in 2003.
MacDonald first began working as a journalist with the New Musical Express in the 1970s. He had moved away from popular music writing by the early 1990s with The New Shostakovich, his re-evaluation of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich against earlier KGB written accounts, but revisited the subject when he started writing for the music magazine Mojo. He wrote a lengthy retrospective on Nick Drake, whom he personally knew when living in Cambridge in the early 1970s, and this led to writing a work about the Beatles.
The book's main section comprises entries on every song recorded by the group, in order of first recording date, rather than date of release. Each entry includes a list of the musicians and instruments present on the track, the song's producers and engineers, and the dates of its recording sessions and its first UK and US releases. MacDonald provides musicological and sociological commentary on each song, ranging in length from a single sentence for "Wild Honey Pie" to several pages for tracks such as "I Want to Hold Your Hand", "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Revolution 1".
The book also contains the essay "Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade", MacDonald's analysis of the Beatles' relationship to the social and cultural changes of the 1960s. Later editions of the book added further commentary: the preface to the first revised edition discusses the British art school scene that spawned the Beatles and some of the differences between British and US culture that affect the two nations' respective views of the group; and the second covers subjects such as the Beatles' continued popularity into the 21st century, criticism of their lyrics, and the death of George Harrison. The book concludes with a month-by-month chronology of the 1960s (consisting of a table listing events in the Beatles' career alongside significant events in UK pop music, current affairs and culture), a bibliography, a glossary, a discography, and an index of songs and their keys.
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