May 1967: The Beatles celebrate the completion of their LP ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’

One, two, three, FOUR ... ”

The long-playing legacy of popular music’s greatest-ever performers had improbably humble beginnings: “I Saw Her Standing There”, the very first track of The Beatles’ very first album, kicked off with a simple count-in, just so that our toes could get tapping in good time. But it was immediately followed by a moment of group infighting. “Well, she was just 17,” the young Paul McCartney had written for his opening couplet, completing the rhyme with what must have been the most fabulous thing he could imagine: a “beauty queen”.

Childish nonsense, said the marginally older John Lennon, who never tired of posing as the more worldly of the two songwriters. Let the listeners use their imaginations, he urged: “Well, she was just 17 ... you know what I mean.” The Beatles’ album life was not yet 20 seconds old and we already had anticipation, some mean guitar playing, a smidgeon of sexual frisson, and discord between the group’s protagonists. It augured well. Just another Merseyside pop group? We should have known better.

Now we can hear those opening salvoes more clearly than ever following the release, the week after next, of the Beatles’ entire back catalogue in digitally remastered form. It is not the first time we have been able retrospectively to take stock of the group’s significance. The flurry of activity in the mid-1990s, focusing on the release of the Anthology television programmes and CDs, and given impetus by copycat groups such as the boorish Oasis, marked the rebirth of a band (or was it now a brand?) that had begun to lose its lustre, prompting a new generation of followers to hurtle to the record shops to pay homage. Pop had shown that it could do endurance as well as evanescence.

But this is something special again. The remastered Beatles project is long overdue. From the time that the group’s albums were transferred to CD in 1987, a clamour has grown among aficionados for more sophisticated versions that would take advantage of the latest technological advances. Such was the dissatisfaction that notorious bootleggers, such as the estimable “Dr Ebbetts”, devoted themselves to producing alternative transfers from vinyl to digital, and making them available online.

Now there is no need for such underground measures. This is the definitive account of the best-known popular music in the world. We can leave the technical details to one side (“a Pro Tools workstation operating at 24-bit 192kHz resolution via a Prism A-D converter”). The important thing is that it doesn’t disappoint. There is greater clarity, warmth and balance on these versions than has ever been possible before. To listen to them is to rediscover a canon of work that will also, once more, find fresh disciples.

There are so many moments that are a testament to the group’s sheer craftsmanship: McCartney’s exuberant, bobbing bass on “Taxman”; Lennon’s rasping vocal on “I Am The Walrus” (occasionally recorded too near the mike – the producers have resisted the temptation to iron out flaws on the original tapes); “Rain”’s thunderous, purposeful drumming; George Harrison’s near-desperate soul-searching on his gentle, scarcely known ballad “Long Long Long” from The White Album. We think we know these songs so well, and then we discover we don’t. There are seemingly infinite layers to them.

The BBC helps celebrate the long-awaited reissues with a “Beatles Week”, kicking off with The Beatles on Record, a one-hour history of the group’s recorded output that acts as a concise account of one of the most socially turbulent decades in human history. The Beatles lived and chronicled the 1960s for us, and here is their journey of disillusionment: from bright-eyed optimists to burnt-out cynics; from “Can’t Buy Me Love” to “You Never Give Me Your Money”.

The one thing that never crossed their quick minds was posterity: “Obviously we can’t keep playing the same sort of music until we are about 40,” says a confident McCartney after the success of their first couple of singles. “Old men playing ‘From Me To You’ – nobody’s going to want to know about that sort of thing.” He has just completed his latest US tour.

There are concessions to the 21st century amid all this frenzied activity. A new computer game, The Beatles: Rock Band, allows you to play along to backing tracks. (It tells you when you screw up, which will be often.) It is a dangerous business, playing Beatles songs: another unmissable treat of the BBC season is a compilation of televised cover versions, ... Sings The Beatles, which includes Su Pollard singing “Back in the USSR” and Nana Mouskouri’s demented “Hey Jude”, complete with bouzouki solo. Neither troubled the hit parade.

So the arrival of these new CDs in the stores has various layers of significance: it is a chance for young people to find out what all the fuss is about, a sociological survey of a fertile era, an elegy for the very founders of modern popular music.

But it announces something else, too. By paying proper respect to pop’s greatest opus – the packaging, which includes mini-documentaries on computer files, is exemplary – we have nowhere left to go: this is the end of the record collection era. The transfer from vinyl to CD was but a staging post compared with what has happened in the computer age. Pop music has become more ephemeral than ever. We click and file-share and squirrel away on MP3 players, but will never again know the pleasures of queuing outside record shops and lingering over pictures and lyric sheets.

That shouldn’t matter, but it does. It is as if all that cardboard and vinyl and plastic contained the very soul of pop. When the Beatles started out, they cared nothing for lasting significance, but achieved it. Today pop music is replete with grandstanders, multi-millionaires and marketing genius, but cannot invent an original chord to save its life (think back to that opening G eleventh suspended fourth of “A Hard Day’s Night”). Buy and listen to any of these CDs, and then try watching The X Factor or American Idol. You will realise that the Beatles remasters are the requiem for an art form. And that their final song – “The End” – was meant to be taken literally, after all.

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden

The Beatles’ remastered albums will be released by Apple/EMI on September 9. ‘The Beatles on Record’ will be broadcast by BBC2 at 8.35pm on September 5, the start of the BBC’s Beatles Week