People are calling it the last great gasp of the CD – it may not save it, but John, Paul, George and Ringo's legacy is looking a little more solid.

I'm talking, of course, about the reissues of the entire remastered Beatles catalogue; a move that is set to make The Beatles the biggest selling artists of the 21st century. It's about time too. The lack of availability of their albums and the refusal to be involved with iTunes has made them the most illegally downloaded band of the new millennium. But now there are 14 pristine CDs on the shelves.
I've actually been buying a few classic albums on CD recently. It occurred to me that, despite it being a good 25 years since CDs exploded onto the scene, there were quite a few things I used to have on vinyl that I still haven't replaced with CD. Mind you, I had a helluva lot of vinyl. But there is always that pull towards the Greatest Hits sets.
It's a bit of a trap. You look at your six Doors LPs and think, 'Do I really want to buy each one of those again, or should I just grab a two CD Greatest Hits set with most of the best songs on it?”
It's easy to do, and it's a pile cheaper.
But each time those urges arise, I whip myself upside the head and remind myself to respect the goddamn music.
And I buy the original albums not the Greatest Hits sets.
Because albums were put together for a reason: great ones are a greater whole than the sum of their parts and they have their own individual tones and moods. If you're listening to Bowie, Aladdin Sane is a totally different experience to Young Americans, and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is totally different from Scary Monsters. Also, Greatest Hits sets never have the obscure gems that after a few listenings become your favourite song.
With The Beatles, there is for me, the added pleasure of actually hearing the songs in their original form.
More than any other band, I think that the Fab Four were in serious danger of, at least in part, losing their legacy. Two things were contributing to this.
Firstly, the fact that the original albums were largely unavailable on CD, having been last issued in 1987 in less than pristine sound condition and secondly, the glut of Beatles ephemera that has been diluting the ‘brand'.
I blame it on the seemingly endless Beatles Anthology series, showcasing different mixes, unreleased versions of songs, acoustic treatments, everything you could imagine except the original music. Then there was Love, the George Martin-produced pastiche for Cirque du Soliel. Add in the ‘naked' version of Let It Be and you have virtually a whole new catalogue.
And, as this lot is what radio stations have had access to for the past decade, this is what we've been hearing, and after a while it messes with your mind. The Beatles' collected works are ingrained in the memory of pretty much every music obsessive from my generation and a few others. It is, for better or worse, the soundtrack of many formative years. 'Yellow Submarine” was the first single my parents bought me (not my choice, incidentally) and every note of those records is etched in my mind.
Then you hear a Beatles tune on the radio and it sounds subtly different. The DJ then announces that it was in fact from the Anthology set, was the 15th take and was the one where John's guitar was turned up and there were extra harmony vocals; another childhood memory is chipped away.
No one has been worse served than The Beatles in this respect. Almost everything that we've heard since the millennium has been alternative versions – the things the band decided not to release. Like inmates running the asylum, the outtakes have taken over the studio.
So I went out and bought half a dozen Beatles albums. They were cheap at the Warehouse. The remastering guys have done a fantastic job. I won't listen to them that often (too much new music to enjoy), but at least when I do it'll be the real thing. And they sound great, just like the originals all those years ago.