Recorded: 16 October 1965-30 April 1969
Released: 7 March 1988
Tracklisting:
‘Day Tripper’
‘We Can Work It Out’
‘Paperback Writer’
‘Rain’
‘Lady Madonna’
‘The Inner Light’
‘Hey Jude’
‘Revolution’
‘Get Back’
‘Don’t Let Me Down’
‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’
‘Old Brown Shoe’
‘Across The Universe’
Let It Be
‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’
Past Masters Volume Two collates all The Beatles’ various singles, b-sides and rarities not included on the original albums between December 1965 and March 1970.
In the 1960s it was customary for groups to release standalone singles; indeed, it was considered bad form to issue songs which were already available elsewhere. As a result, The Beatles released a number of tracks on singles which were unavailable elsewhere.
When EMI sought to standardise The Beatles’ canon in 1987, their UK albums were issued worldwide. The following year the two Past Masters volumes were released; until Live At The BBC in 1994, and the Tony Sheridan recordings from the early 1960s, these CDs constituted all the officially-released Beatles songs.
The second Past Masters included the single versions of Get Back and Let It Be, as well as the pre-Phil Spector version of Across The Universe originally issued on the World Wildlife Fund’s 1969 charity LP No One’s Gonna Change Our World.
In April 2009 Apple/EMI announced that a remastered version of Past Masters would be released as a stereo double-CD set that September, as well as a monophonic version in the Mono Masters box set.