First released: 2000, November 13

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I agree that this is a masterpiece. Arguably it is an impossible task to put the best Beatles songs on a single CD, but the idea was to put those numbers on it that were a number one hit on either the US or the UK hit lists. Then they only miss one song, namely For You Blue which was the double A side on The Long And Winding Road - so I read somewhere. I think this collection is super. The music sounds fresh, like it was just released. I am anxiously waiting for the complete catalogue to be made available remastered.

This album is clearly a masterpiece; its content is the blue print to the next 35 yrs worth of music. That much we all know. However, what I object to on this site is someone called Stephen Thomas Erlewine and his blatent plagiarism of other people's reviews. I think they ALL come from Revolution In the Head by the late, great Ian McDonald. Be careful of passing other people's work off as your own - some people may have read the same books as you. Especially Beatle titles. Silly boy.

My reaction to this album was, "Is that it?". I found it hard to believe that they could fit a "Greatest Hits" type of record of the Beatles into 1 CD, and I guess I was right. Maybe they should have gone the route that McCartney did with his Wingspan set (although it was released later, after the success of "1"), and made a 2-disk set, one for the hits, the other for the more memorable songs, such as "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds", "Strawberry Fields Forever", "I Am The Walrus", "Revolution", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", and so on. Seeing all of the songs from both Sgt. Pepper's and The White Album excluded made me shake my head. As a Beatles fan, I can say that there's no such thing as a "bad" Beatles album, but those albums were two of the most widely known albums. Maybe if there was a follow-up compilation, it wouldn't have been so bad, but because of the lack of two whole albums, I had to give "1" a 4 out of 5.

Apparently, there was a gap in the Beatles' catalog, after all — all the big hits weren't on one tidy, single-disc compilation. It's not the kind of gap you'd necessarily notice — it's kind of like realizing you don't have a pair of navy blue dress socks — but it was a gap all the same, so the group released Beatles 1 late in 2000, coinciding with the publication of their official autobiography, the puzzlingly titled Anthology. The idea behind this compilation is to have all the number one singles the Beatles had, either in the U.K. or U.S., on one disc, and that's pretty much what this generous 27-track collection is. It's easy, nay necessary, to quibble with a couple of the judgment calls — look, "Please Please Me" should be here instead of "From Me to You," and it's unforgivable to bypass "Strawberry Fields Forever" (kick out "Yellow Submarine" or "Eleanor Rigby") — but there's still no question that this is all great music, and there is a bit of a rush hearing all these dazzling songs follow one after another. If there's any complaint, it's that even if it's nice to have something like this, it's not really essential. There's really no reason for anyone that owns all the records to get this too — if you've lived happily without the red or blue albums, you'll live without this. But, if you give this to any six- or seven-year-old, they'll be pop fans, even fanatics, for life. And that's reason enough for it to exist. — Stephen Thomas Erlewine