The White stuff: How The Beatles made their weirdest album

One reviewer called The Beatles' White Album 'a sprawling, motley assemblage'. But it has aged well.

A meditation guru, monkey sex and Yoko Ono: 50 years on, the White Album remains The Beatles' strangest album. Paul Little charts its creation.

A double album called simply The Beatles, with an all-white cover, was released on November 22, 1968. It was the ninth album by the most popular group in the world.

It stayed at No. 1 on the US and UK charts for several weeks.

Fifty years later, one of the group, Paul McCartney, would release Egypt Station, an album that also topped the Billboard charts. An extraordinary achievement across half a century, but there is a lot about The Beatles that is extraordinary, including The Beatles.

The album is not as tightly controlled as Revolver, nor as ambitious as Sergeant Pepper, its immediate predecessor. It's an almost hit and miss collection of songs, but for many, this lack of consistency is a large part of its charm.

In her book The Beatles: Here, There and Everywhere, Nancy J. Hajeski lists the variety of styles employed on it: sound collage, chamber music, music hall, calypso, country, easy listening, folk, talking blues, 12-bar blues, surf music, Latin and rock and roll. There's even, as she also points out, a song you can use as an alternative to "Happy birthday".

Much of the writing was done in India when The Beatles were under the influence – or perhaps it would be truer to say, getting out from under the influence of Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Up there in Rishika, there really wasn't a lot to do except meditate or write, and for two people as creative as John Lennon and Paul McCartney the attractions of meditation quickly waned.

By the time they were back in England and ready to get to work on their new album, Lennon had 15 songs that were good to go, McCartney had seven and George Harrison five.

Even Ringo Starr made his songwriting debut, with the rollicking Don't Pass Me By, which we know had been written many years before as it was mentioned in an interview The Beatles gave in New Zealand in 1964.

There's a lot of humour on the album. The Beatles had always been witty writers but here the jokes often have an edge. Sexy Sadie is a bitter lampoon of the Maharishi. Glass Onion, by Lennon, turns on the fans, sending up their obsessiveness. "Here's another clue for you all/The walrus was Paul," he sneers. And although George Harrison's lambasting of capitalists, Piggies, is not the most profound piece of social commentary put to music in 1968, it sure is catchy.

There are affectionate songs about real people. Dear Prudence was written for Mia Farrow's sister Prudence, who was in India at the same time as the band and taking meditative practice a little more intensely than was good for her mental health. Everyone thought she should "come out and play" as the song implores.

Julia is Lennon's moving lament for his dead mother. But with its reference to "oceanchild", it is also about Ono, whom he called Mother and whose name in Japanese means child of the ocean. So that's weird. Although perhaps not as weird as the fact that, Lennon once said, Ono is also the simian referred to in Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and my Monkey. That song is about the fact that everyone else cared a lot when he left his wife Cynthia for Ono, but that he and Ono had "nothing to hide".

Back in the USSR takes Chuck Berry's anthem Back in the USA and reinvents it as a droll commentary on the Cold War seen through a pop writer's adolescent sensibility: "The Ukraine girls really knock me out/They leave the West behind".

Why Don't We Do It in the Road is a caustic view of human instincts, inspired by watching two monkeys doing it in the road in India. It was reportedly improvised by McCartney and Starr.

Some of the songs have taken on a life of their own, attracting myths and mystique. Charles Manson was obsessed with the record and developed his own twisted interpretation of many of its lyrics as prophecies of race war, notably Helter Skelter and Piggies.

One other Beatles classic was recorded around this time but not included. Instead, Hey Jude was only released as a single. It's as if they were saying: we're so confident of what we've got, just listen to what we can afford to leave off the album.

During the five months it took to record there were more than the usual creative tensions, especially when Ono turned up and just sat there. She did, however, became the only non-Beatle to sing a vocal on a Beatles song with a line on Bungalow Bill.

Ringo had enough and stropped off at one point. The others tried their hand at drumming duties but were extremely glad when he came back after a week.

George, Paul, John and Ringo around the time of the White Album's release.

Opinion may have been divided at the time. "A sprawling, motley assemblage," sniffed Time magazine. "Not one of their best," thought the New York Times. "Lyrics are light … lacking in substance, rather like potato chips".

But 50 years on, The Beatles is one of the band's best-selling albums and consistently appears near the top of "best of" lists. It's supplanted Sergeant Pepper, which by comparison seems overblown, in the estimation of critics and the hearts of fans.

Should you buy the box set?

It wouldn't be a musical landmark's 50th anniversary without an elaborate, over-packaged re-release and The Beatles, as its officially known, or The White Album, as everyone calls it, has more versions than most for completists to lust after.

There's even one which comes with a turntable – white, of course - and costs just shy of $3000.

The White Album has been re-released.

There's nothing in the catalogue quite as extreme as the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series reissue of everything he recorded in 1965 and 1966 on 18 CDS. But there is plenty to choose from.

According to ultimatmeclassicrock.com, "a deluxe edition includes three CDs, while another features four LPs, while a limited-edition super deluxe version contains six CDs and a Blu-ray carrying multiple mixes, all packed in a hardback book".

You can get up to 50 previously unreleased alternate versions and additional songs.
Rolling Stone was beside itself with anticipation: "The Beatles' 1968 masterpiece has always been the deepest mystery in their story — their wildest, strangest, most experimental, most brilliant music. But as it turns out, the White Album is even weirder than anyone realized."

A real highlight – and by all accounts a standalone musical treat in its own right – is the inclusion of what are known as the Esher demos, recorded at George Harrison's home in Surrey. These are one of the grails of Beatles fandom – their existence known and long discussed but mostly unheard until now.

On the demos, you can listen to The Beatles basically busking their way through the songs on the album, plus a few extras. They chat, muck around and generally give the lie to John Lennon's famous observation that this album was "the sound of the Beatles breaking up", even if the final recording featured all four Beatles playing together on only 16 of the 30 songs.

It's like listening to The Beatles would be if they came around to your house with a couple of guitars and played their new album for you.

• The re-release of The Beatles' White Album is out now. For more information, visit thebeatles.com.