Ah, here we are. It's been at least three years since The Beatles last released anything (and then it was the appalling megamix that was “Love”). Three years before that it was “Let It Be Naked”, and before that.. and before that... oh, you get the idea. It's about time everything The Beatles ever did was re-packaged, re-mastered, and re-released in a fancy box with a DVD and a book. Aside from the film of “Let It Be”, mysteriously airbrushed out of history and selling for £100 on Ebay, on VHS, everything The Beatles did has been flogged to death repeatedly over the years. I'm not sure where it will end, but it probably should soon. The next step will be the sound of George Harrison eating crackers in Abbey Road and John Lennons between song banter stitched together to create a “Beatles Bollocks” spoken word album.

Oh, yes, for The Beatles fan it's a fabulous moment of history : the original albums all restored faithfully to the limits current technology can provide, remastered to sound warm and free of the evils of brutal compression and hot mastering, free from the limitations of a 12” disc, 33rpm, and the needle jumping out of the grooves. For the non-Beatles fan, it's a so so excuse in nostalgia from a musical museum piece.

The Beatles story is short and long : 8 years, 13 albums, 200 something songs, a few EP's, some awful movies, and forty years of post-split revisionism, live records, compilations, rarities and best ofs. For the uninitiated, and I am one who is barely aware of anything other than the better known parts of the catalogue – and the risible “Maxwell's Silver Hammer” - this boxset is your easy one stop shop for Beatles stuff. Pick up this, and the “Anthology” set, and “Let It Be.. Naked”, and that's pretty much all you need.

Well, that and love after all.

In those records The Beatles turned from anodyne peddlers of competent love songs to drug-whacked crazies at the edge of popular culture. The deification of The Beatles as THE ONLY BAND THAT EVER MATTERS. EVER, is both threatening to popular discourse – and wrong. The Beatles were good, but horrendously over-rated. Whilst I personally would love The Men In Black to wipe their existence from my memory, well, they can't, and there's nothing I can do about that.

But is it any good? Aside from the fact that these faithful reproductions of the original vinyl releases recreate the inner and outer sleeves, typography, image and aural intentions of the original releases, there's little new here for the Beatles fanatic. Just the records, as they were, but now smaller. The previous CD releases are obviously obselete. Originally released in the days when the aural reproduction, the issues of tape hiss, the left/right mono/stereo divide, the previous Beatles CD's were poor reproductions of the originals, squashing the sound with lazy, basic transfers that concealed much but not all of the detail of the original recordings.

The good is that these records – and I need not describe the contents in any great detail for they are part of the human psyche in the same way that breathing is – have never sounded better : the sound is rich, warm, full, and precise – carefully avoiding the brutal and evil compression and hot mastering that ruins many a reissue. The sleeves and packaging carefully reproduce the vinyl versions in a near-perfect facsimile of the original releases.

There are no bonus tracks, no alternate mixes, nothing that does not constitute the official canon of work : “Anthology”, “Let It Be... Naked”, and “Live” are absent. Talking of which, an official release on CD of the “Live” album is LONG overdue. All you get in this set - with a couple of minor elements of tidying up to straighten out the complex discography of the 60's -, is the records released and approved by The Beatles during their lifetime.

In the box set, there's a DVD, which consists of mostly familiar material from the “Anthology” documentaries. Nothing to get hung about.

Would I recommend this? Well, if you are to own The Beatles body of work on CD, start here. It has never sounded or looked better. But to be honest, do you really need this? Probably not. Indulge yourself if you want and buy it. If not, well, there's still the old records.

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