Past Masters Volume 1 & Volume 2 (1988)
Past Masters Volume 1
1.Love Me Do
2.From Me To You
3.Thank You Girl
4.She Loves You
5.I'll Get You
6.I Want To Hold Your Hand
7.This Boy
8.Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand
9.Sie Liebt Dich
10.Long Tall Sally
11.I Call Your Name
12.Slow Down
13.Matchbox
14.I Feel Fine
15.She's A Woman
16.Bad Boy
17.Yes It Is
18.I'm Down
Past Masters Volume 2
1.Day Tripper
2.We Can Work It Out
3.Paperback Writer
4.Rain
5.Lady Madonna
6.The Inner Light
7.Hey Jude
8.Revolution
9.Get Back
10.Don't Let Me Down
11.The Ballad of John and Yoko
12.Old Brown Shoe
13.Across the Universe
14.Let it Be
15. You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)
The release of Past Masters Volume One and Two was, if nothing else, a necessary act of archival justice. By the late 1980s, when EMI finally brought The Beatles’ catalog to the CD format, fans were confronted with a curious dilemma. The band’s original UK albums were chosen as the definitive versions—logical in one sense, but not without consequence. A swathe of classic singles and B-sides—tracks that never found their way onto LPs—were left adrift. Past Masters exists as their refuge.
What we have, then, is not merely a pair of compilations, but a bridge between fractured formats and historical realities. Songs like I Want to Hold Your Hand, "She Loves You, and Hey Jude are among the band’s most significant contributions to popular music, yet they had been inexplicably omitted from the standard UK album sequence. Including them here is no act of charity—it is essential curation. Without these volumes, the story is incomplete.
To quibble, perhaps EMI could have retrofitted these tracks into the original LPs as bonus cuts, preserving chronology and offering fans a more integrated listening experience. But this would have risked disrupting the near-sacred "flow" of the albums themselves—a notion some purists cling to with religious fervor. Yet, viewed practically, Past Masters stands as the compromise: a tidy collection that doesn’t rewrite history, but documents it.
Musically, there’s little here that smacks of filler. The early material, including She Loves You and I Call Your Name, bristles with youthful vigor and melodic invention. Later entries—The Inner Light, Revolution, and Don't Let Me Down—offer insight into the band’s evolution, lyrical expansion, and sonic experimentation. The breadth is staggering, the quality rarely less than excellent.
Past Masters is, ultimately, the attic where all the misfit toys were stored—except these toys still shine. For completists, it's a requirement. For casual listeners, it really is as well.