The Beatles had no established pattern to follow. There was no showbiz pathway that acts their size typically followed - because there were no rock'n'roll bands as big as the Beatles before them. There's television interviews with the Beatles in 1963 (from when they were very popular in the UK but before they had broke big in the US) where Lennon and McCartney talk about an ambition to continue being professional songwriters after Beatlemania dies off. Ringo apparently planned on opening a hairdressing salon once Beatlemania died off in a few months and they were no longer the big thing. Beatlemania obviously didn't die off a few months after that - instead, it became a worldwide phenomenon in 1964, and continued being a worldwide phenomenon in 1965, if not quite the regular frontpage news it was in 1964.

The upshot of this is that nobody knew what worked anymore. The Beatles were a new category of act in the first place - the leaderless, self-contained, rock'n'roll group, featuring different singers who also played instruments, was vanishingly rare in rock'n'roll and pop before The Beatles. Generally, bands didn't write their own material before the Beatles. (And yes, the Beatles were absolutely influenced by Buddy Holly's band The Crickets). When Brian Epstein was shopping the act around to labels like Decca and EMI before they got signed, the Artist & Repertoire men responsible for signing acts weren't sure what to make of the Beatles; they didn't fit into a pre-established category that the A&R guys knew how to package and market. Broadly speaking, the Beatles also were quite innovative as songwriters and performers - they combined Brill Building melodicism and craft with an understanding of the importance of rock'n'roll energy and rambunctiousness. And The Beatles did have this rambunctiousness musically because they had signed onto very specific ideas of masculinity, authenticity and cool which were not incredibly common in the UK at the time (and which very much fit with the way the baby boomer generation conceived themselves).

In this context, The Beatles were incredibly lucky that they signed to Parlophone Records and had George Martin as producer, because Martin was one of the few producers in England who had the vision and ability to take the Beatles to where they wanted to go. Martin, in the context of EMI's producer hierarchy, was considered not that comfortable with pop acts in general, and in many ways the Beatles were foisted on him.

However, because he wasn't a well-established producer of pop music, he was less hung up about trying to make the Beatles fit into a particular pigeonhole, and working with them in sessions, he came to appreciate their humour, their outlook, which he shared more of than he let on (with his widely parodied patrician bearing). And he basically came to the conclusion that the Beatles knew what the source of their appeal was, and that they were immensely charismatic, and that he should let them be The Beatles; as producer, he brought a song called 'How Do You Do It' to The Beatles, and they recorded it but hated it and begged him to not release it (despite his certainty it would be a hit). Martin was one of the very few producers in England or the USA in 1962 who would have listened to The Beatles there. He was also one of the few producers who would have responded with enthusiasm when The Beatles began to ask him to do things that were artistic and musically more ambitious than the majority of pop.

And because of Martin's previous work producing comedy albums by The Goons, which had exploited the possibility of the medium and of the recording session for comic effect, he had both the respect of the Beatles and he and Geoff Emerick, the engineer, often had the skills and experience to implement some of the Beatles' odder suggestions (John Lennon famously asking Martin to make his vocal on 'Tomorrow Never Knows' sound like a chorus of Tibetan monks chanting on a mountaintop; Emerick was the one who figured out that Lennon would be happy if they fed the vocal through a rotating Leslie speaker usually attached to a Hammond organ).

Secondly, there was Bob Dylan, who by the time he introduced the Beatles to marijuana's typical set and setting (if not the drug itself), was the voice of the American counterculture. The Beatles, at the time, and in later interviews, clearly credit Bob Dylan's music with encouraging them to write about what they were thinking about, for better or worse, rather than the listener-focused pop music lyrics they had assumed they had to write for their fans (e.g., they wrote 'From Me To You' with a keen awareness of the psychology of being a Beatles fan). As a result, the Beatles, and particularly John Lennon, in 1964 begin to write songs that are more from the heart ('Help!' and 'I'm A Loser'). By 1965 this had progressed to lyrics that felt more like the absurdist, pun-filled stream-of-consciousness silliness Lennon had circulated amongst his friends as a teen and published in the wake of Beatlemania as A Spaniard In The Works ('Norwegian Wood', in particular, was very influenced by Dylan). By 1966, Lennon was reciting the Tibetan Book Of The Dead in his lyrics.

Another very big influence on the Beatles' experimental music in the mid-1960s was their moving from Liverpool to London, and finding their way into being part of the 'Swinging London' social scene. John Lennon had gone to art school with former Beatles bass player Stuart Sutcliffe, a talented artist, and to some extent the group had always applied some very art student logic to their music - and while Paul and George didn't go to art school, they were certainly within Lennon's orbit and soaked up the art school atmosphere. For this reason, they gravitated to the counterculture art scene in London. And McCartney lived in London with the progressive, cultured, rich family of his fiancee at the time, Jane Asher, who were around this scene, and learned a lot.

This association with 1960s counterculture was a very long-lasting one: Paul McCartney's 1990s autobiography Many Years From Now is co-written with Barry Miles, who was famous in the 1960s within the Swinging London scene for founding the Indica Gallery, an important hub within the London counterculture. Through becoming a part of the cool set in London, the Beatles were exposed to basically every intellectual fad and cool drug that went through the London scene, from the Maharishi to Primal Scream therapy, and the London scene is all over their mid-1960s works. Tara Browne, a London socialite who passed away in 1966 in a car accident, socialised with the Beatles and was widely seen as the inspiration for the verse in their 'A Day In The Life'.

Often Revolver is thought of as a landmark album, and In this interview Paul talks about the influences behind it - basically their talents as songwriters were improving while at the same time their interests and influences were expanding. George was interested in Indian culture and music, Paul was interested in electronic music and had become heavily involved in the London counterculture and Avant Garde art world, John had just got into LSD and wanted to write about it, and they'd just appointed the 20 year old Geoff Emerick as their sound engineer, and he was willing to go wherever the Beatles wanted to to help get the sound they were looking for. For example John recorded the vocals for tomorrow never knows upside down to get the sound he wanted.

The problem with this is it almost forced them into becoming two separate bands, because they couldn't play the songs off revolver live because the technology wasn't there to stage them. So their following world tour was full of songs from their previous albums - and this plus the fact no one could hear them, plus the death threats from John's 'bigger than Jesus' statement led them to stop touring. In turn this gave them even more freedom to experiment in the studio without worrying about how they would stage the songs in a concert, and so sgt pepper was even more experimental.

They were also becoming more and more famous and so being allowed more and more time in the studio - you have to remember their first album, please please me, was recorded mostly in one day, whereas sgt pepper took months to record. That means songs can be experimented with and worked on from an idea stage, whereas their first few albums they had to arrive with finished songs that were ready to record.

Paul sums it up in that interview:

Q: Do you find problems from people who want you to play to the teenagers?

Paul: yeah well the thing is you see, we've kept quite a few songs on the album - you see if we suddenly did exactly what we want to do - in fact I think that is what we want to do, what we've done on Revolver. But if we did all the way out things - I suppose people think it is way out, I don't actually - but if we did a whole album of them, then we'd be doing what people who make electronic music do, they go too far out too suddenly, and no one stays with them. Everyone's left behind because they're miles out ahead, digging all this electronic stuff. But we did the last album, rubber soul, a bit more towards that, then this one a bit more, and the next should be a bit more, and if people stay with us, it's great.

Q: Paul, your music is improving every time, and your lyrics are more interesting -

Paul: well see that's the thing, if you look back to say, 1960, when we were playing love me do, please please me, from me to you - it was one kind of thing - and it was the kind of thing people liked. But I think if we went back to that, our fans now wouldn't like that too much, because it'd be taking a step back, retracing our steps. And from our point of view, we'd never go back, and if anyone ever said "you're going too way out, you've got to go back to then" - well we'd just give up.