Deliver to cora – Nottingham NG2 7
This week has seen the announcement of a “Rubber Soul” box set. It has been almost four years since Apple Corps launched a super deluxe edition of a Beatles studio album. The last release was September 2022 with the “Revolver” boxed set . To put this in perspective, “Sgt. Pepper”, ‘The White Album’, “Abbey Road” and “Let It Be” were all released in a four year period (between 2017 and 2021) .
It’s not that nothing has been happening for the Beatles, rather the project choices have been, at times, odd. The ‘Now and Then’ single of 2023 ended up leading to a massive best of ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ album’s reissue campaign and created lots of work for Giles Martin and his team in terms of new 2023 stereo and Atmos mixes.
In 2024, Apple felt obliged to celebrate the ‘US Albums’ and then last year we had “Anthology 4” and the “Anthology Collection” created to mark the fact that the original series was going to Disney+.
There was nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but the US Albums campaign felt like retreading old ground and Apple rather annoyed fans by initially announcing that the only way to get “Anthology 4” would be to buy “Anthologies 1, 2 & 3” all over again.
Both vinyl and CD box sets of “Rubber Soul”, unsurprisingly, offer new stereo mixes of the album by Giles Martin and Sam Okell. This is fairly much par for the course these days, and every other format uses this mix as the ‘main’ mix for the album. But what of the two other stereo remixes? The original 1965 stereo mix (which by stealth appeared in The Beatles in Mono CD box) and George Martin’s 1987 stereo remix (which was remastered and reissued on CD and vinyl in 2009) are nowhere to be found on any format. No one is saying that we necessarily need these on separate CDs or vinyl LPs in the big box sets, but surely there was a place for them on the blu-ray edition, with its enormous capacity for audio and video?
There’s always this feeling with new Beatles product that they want you to forget about what has come before. If you recall, two songs from “Rubber Soul” (‘Think For Yourself’ and ‘Nowhere Man’) were completely remixed in stereo for the 1999 “Yellow Submarine” ‘Songtrack’ release. These were stunning at the time and while I’m sure Giles Martin would argue that both are now redundant due to advances in technology (particularly ‘de-mixing’)
On a more positive note, the original mono mix of “Rubber Soul“ is included in both the 4CD and 5LP box sets,.
There’s no 5.1 mix which is crazy, because they are relatively easy to create from an existing Atmos Mix, albeit I imagine nothing is ‘easy’ in the world of approvals with the surviving Beatles and John and George’s Estates. More annoying is the lack of mono mix of “Rubber Soul“.
The final comment is that, until recently, Apple were always relatively restrained with single LP vinyl formats when it came to The Beatles; we had some picture discs, but that has mostly been it. But for “Rubber Soul” we are getting coloured vinyl and ‘Zoetrope’ versions, in addition to the normal black vinyl editions.
“Rubber Soul” will be reissued on 2nd October 2026 via UMR/Calderstone.
The Fat Angel Sings 