Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover

When the wait for Guns N’ Roses’ album Chinese Democracy soared past the decade mark, Axl Rose’s legal team had the temerity to suggest that the wait for the record was because “great art sometimes takes time”. This is a bold statement because in the time between the release of the Use Your Illusion duology and Chinese Democracy, The Beatles could have formed and split twice.

OK, not quite. There were 17 years between them so The Fabs could have formed and split… 1.7 times, I guess, but that’s close enough, and the point still stands. The Beatles were together for all of a decade and still managed to create some of the best pop music ever and define the very concept as an art form. It’s the reason why so many people are fascinated by what might have been had they not split in 1970. It’s incredible that The Beatles can be considered the greatest rock band ever, and still, people feel like they could have done more.

Then, on September 9th, 2009, something very strange happened. On the same day an official Beatles anniversary campaign was going ahead, a website went live with the URL “thebeatlesneverbrokeup.com”.

On the site was a story from a man calling himself James Richards, who had one hell of a tall tale to tell. He talked about knocking himself out while on a road trip, coming to and finding himself in a parallel universe where ketchup is purple, the dominant form of listening to music is still cassette tapes, and The Beatles never split up.

You might have been tempted to say, “Yeah, sure, mate, what were you on before you passed out?” However, something made his story stand out. A cassette tape called Everyday Chemistry, an entirely new Beatles album from this parallel dimension where they never split up. He had a few photos of the cassette on the website and, most importantly of all, he’d uploaded the entire thing as an MP3.

What’s more, the record wasn’t just pale imitations of what new songs by the Beatles might have sounded like, but actual songs that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr all wrote! In their solo careers. Ah.

How does this “new Beatles album” work?

Yeah, sorry to get your hopes up, but James Richards’ (geddit?) story is a marketing ploy for what is, essentially, a pretty decent mashup album of The Beatles’ solo work. If anything, the real mystery is the identity of James Richards.

Whoever they are, they’re a very talented producer who combed through hours of Beatles solo work to make this passion project and put it on the internet for completely free. That’s an astonishing piece of work.

I mean, Danger Mouse became one of the most respected music producers of his generation with a similar Beatles mash-up album, when he combined The White Album with Jay-Z’s The Black Album to make the still incredible Grey Album. However, James Richards seems content to stay in the spotlight despite works like ‘Sick To Death’ being genuinely impressive. What else can you call a song that effectively mashes up Lennon’s ‘Gimme Some Truth’, McCartney’s ‘No More Lonely Nights’, Harrison’s ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea’ and Starr’s ‘All By Myself’?

That’s the truly impressive part of the album. Every song is a fairly even split between the four Fabs, with a few flourishes coming from other songs, but nothing more than that. In the storyline, Richards explains this by saying, “even though in the alternate universe The Beatles hadn’t broken up, that didn’t mean their future music ideas disappeared.”

While that story is a fun time, the real what might have been comes from what we could have gotten had “James Richards” unmasked and kept making music. That said, maybe he’s been a superstar this whole time? We might never know.