The White Album was the first major release to deploy incoherence as a deliberate artistic strategy. It contains space-fillers even though there’s no space that needs filling, and is sequenced in such a way as to accentuate its jumbling together of the archaic and the avant-garde, the meaningless and the profound, the generous and the toxic, the ragged and the luminous, the spiritual and the profane, the desperately moving and the too silly for words. Many of John Lennon’s cryptic contributions are an assault on rationality itself. To be an editor is to presume that somehow The Beatles got it wrong and would rather have released 45 minutes of bangers. To be a sprawler is to embrace that rare, intoxicating quality that you might call everythingness. Perhaps that is why they called it The Beatles. This is what The Beatles is in 1968, the title implied. All of it. The whole damn mess.

Over the years we’ve learned almost everything there is to know about the circumstances of its creation. We know that due to various rows, sulks and walkouts, the first stage of the band’s disintegration, all four Beatles appear on fewer than half the songs. We know about Yoko Ono’s contentious presence, Ringo’s huffy absence from Back in the USSR, John’s contempt for Paul’s “granny music shit”, and so on. We know that they were less than a year away from the last time that they all stood in a studio together, although in the newly released demos we can also hear that there was still plenty of fun to be had, despite those fissures. Even at the time, I imagine, one could hear pop’s quintessential gang of mates splintering into four individuals, and their musical fusions unravelling into discrete genre exercises. Listening to it is like watching an explosion in slow motion.

‘Wild, whirling spirit’

The White Album therefore made a fitting capstone for one of the most wildly eventful years of the 20th Century. The Beatles entered Abbey Road Studios to start recording on 30 May, and administered the finishing touches on 14 October. During that period, Charles de Gaulle quelled the student protests in Paris; Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague; Robert F Kennedy was shot dead in Los Angeles; James Earl Ray was arrested for the murder of Martin Luther King; the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was marked by violence and chaos to the delight of Republican candidate Richard Nixon; the Ba’ath Party seized power in Iraq; the Tet Offensive concluded in Vietnam; the Troubles began in Northern Ireland; Andy Warhol mounted his first exhibition in Britain (and survived an assassination attempt); feminists protested the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City; censorship in British theatres came to an end, prompting the cast of Hair to take to the stage naked; Britain’s first abortion clinic opened its doors; and Nasa launched the first manned Apollo mission (Apollo 7). And that was just the 20 weeks while the Beatles were in the studio.It was an everything-at-once kind of year.