Should you buy the box set?

It wouldn’t be a musical landmark’s 50th anniversary without an elaborate, over-packaged re-release and The Beatles, as it’s officially known, or The White Album, as everyone calls it, has more versions than most for completists to lust after.

There’s even one that comes with a turntable — white, of course — and costs just shy of $3000. There’s nothing in the catalogue quite as extreme as the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series reissue of everything he recorded in 1965 and 1966 on 18 CDS. But there is plenty to choose from. According to ultimateclassicrock.com, “a deluxe edition includes three CDs, while another features four LPs, while a limited-edition super deluxe version contains six CDs and a Blu-ray carrying multiple mixes, all packed in a hardback book”. You can get up to 50 previously unreleased alternate versions and additional songs. Rolling Stone was beside itself with anticipation: “The Beatles’ 1968 masterpiece has always been the deepest mystery in their story — their wildest, strangest, most experimental, most brilliant music. But as it turns out, the White Album is even weirder than anyone realised.”

A real highlight — and by all accounts a standalone musical treat in its own right — is the inclusion of what are known as the Esher demos, recorded at George Harrison’s home in Surrey. These are one of the grails of Beatles fandom — their existence known and long-discussed but mostly unheard until now.

On the demos, you can listen to The Beatles basically busking their way through the songs on the album, plus a few extras.

They chat, muck around and generally give the lie to John Lennon’s famous observation that this album was “the sound of the Beatles breaking up”, even if the final recording featured all four Beatles playing together on only 16 of the 30 songs.

It’s like listening to The Beatles would be if they came around to your house with a couple of guitars and played their new album for you.