"Revolver", the seventh studio album by the Beatles (produced by George Martin) was released on 5 August 1966. Many of the tracks on Revolver feature an electric guitar-rock sound that contrasts with their previous LP, the folk rock inspired Rubber Soul (1965). In Britain, the fourteen tracks from Revolver were released to radio stations throughout July 1966, "building anticipation for what would clearly be a radical new phase in the group's recording career". The album reached number one on the British chart on 13 August 1966 and charted for 34 weeks. It also reached number one on the American chart and stayed at the top spot for six weeks. It was ranked number 1 in the All-Time Top 1000 Albums and number 3 in the Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Revolver extends the more adventurous aspects of its predecessor -- its introspection, its nascent psychedelia, its fascination with studio artistry -- into a dramatic statement of generational possibility. The album made it thrillingly clear that what we now think of as "the Sixties" was fully -- and irreversibly -- under way. The most innovative track on the album is John Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows." Attempting to distill an LSD trip into a three-minute song, Lennon borrowed lyrics from Timothy Leary's version of The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, and recorded his vocal to sound like "the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountaintop." Tape loops, a backward guitar part (Paul McCartney's blistering solo on "Taxman," in fact) and a droning tamboura completed the experimental effect, and the song proved hugely influential. For his part, on "Eleanor Rigby" and "For No One," McCartney mastered a strikingly mature form of art song, and Harrison, with "Taxman," "I Want to Tell You" and "Love You To," challenged Lennon-McCartney's songwriting dominance. (www.rollingstone.com) The cover illustration was created by German-born bassist and artist Klaus Voormann, one of the Beatles' oldest friends from their days at the Star Club in Hamburg. Voormann's illustration, part line drawing and part collage, included photographs by Robert Whitaker, who also took the back cover photographs and many other images of the group between 1964 and 1966, such as the infamous "butcher cover" for Yesterday and Today. Voormann's own photo as well as his name (Klaus O. W. Voormann) is worked into Harrison's hair on the right-hand side of the cover. In the Revolver cover appearing in his artwork for Anthology 3, he replaced this image with a more recent photo. Harrison's Revolver image was seen again on his single release of "When We Was Fab" along with an updated version of the same image. The title "Revolver", like "Rubber Soul" before it, is a pun, referring both to a kind of handgun as well as the "revolving" motion of the record as it is played on a turntable. The Beatles had a difficult time coming up with this title. According to Barry Miles in his book Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, the title that the four had originally wanted was Abracadabra, until they discovered that another band had already used it. After that, opinion split: Lennon wanted to call it Four Sides of the Eternal Triangle and Starr jokingly suggested After Geography, playing on The Rolling Stones' recently released Aftermath LP. Other suggestions included Magic Circles, Beatles on Safari, Pendulum, and, finally, Revolver, whose wordplay was the one that all four agreed upon. The title was chosen while the band were on tour in Germany late June 1966. They spent much of their time in their hotels in Munich, in a special train between Munich, Essen and Hamburg and in their Hotel Tremsbüttel outside Hamburg. The name Revolver was selected finally while in the Hamburg hotel as drafts proof. The Beatles' tour of Asia did not feature any songs from that album, and neither did the subsequent last tour (U.S., that August). This was a further indication of how far their studio recordings had diverged from what they were still playing live.

• published: 01 Nov 2013
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