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Regarded as the greatest and most revealing account of how the Beatles recorded every one of their songs, Revolution in the Head is brimming with details of the personal highs and lows experienced by Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr as they made some of the most enduring popular music ever created.

Many people will recognise the famous zebra crossing. Some visitors may have graffitied their name on its hallowed outer walls. Others might even have managed to penetrate the iron gates. But what draws in these thousands of fans here, year after year? What is it that really happens behind the doors of the most celebrated recording studio in the world? It may have begun life as an affluent suburban house, but it soon became a creative hub renowned around the world as a place where great music, ground-breaking sounds and unforgettable tunes were forged.

On New Year's Eve, 1970, Paul McCartney told his lawyers to issue the writ at the High Court in London, effectively ending The Beatles. You might say this was the last day of the pop era. The following day, which was a Friday, was 1971. You might say this was the first day of the rock era. And within the remaining 364 days of this monumental year, the world would hear Don McLean's "American Pie", The Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar", The Who's "Baba O'Riley", Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven", and more.

The Beatles landing in New York in February 1964 was the opening shot in a cultural revolution nobody predicted. Suddenly the youth of the richest, most powerful nation on earth was trying to emulate the music, manners and the modes of a rainy island that had recently fallen on hard times.

The era of the LP began in 1967, with Sgt Pepper; The Beatles didn’t just collect together a bunch of songs, they Made an Album. Henceforth, everybody else wanted to Make an Album. The end came only 15 years later, coinciding with the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. By then the Walkman had taken music out of the home and into the streets, and the record business had begun trying to reverse engineer the creative process in order to make big money. Nobody would play music or listen to it in quite the same way ever again.

Pop music’s a simple pleasure. Is it catchy? Can you dance to it? Do you fancy the singer? What’s fascinating about pop is our relationship with it. This relationship gets more complicated the longer it goes on. It’s been going on now for 50 years. David Hepworth is interested in the human side of pop. He’s interested in how people make the stuff and, more importantly, what it means to us. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, he shows how it is possible to take music seriously and, at the same time, not drain the life out of it.