A what-if album is only as strong as the material already at hand. What it means for The Beatles’ Calico Skies, an unofficial compilation of songs from the band members, is fitting within the limitations of history. There is care taken, as there often is with these bootleg efforts, to follow a line of reasoning which can be agreeable to the passing fan and dedicated listener. There is no chance of an out-there appearance. No songs from Unfinished Music Vol. 1 make it onto Calico Skies, for instance. Nor is there much space for other material. A tight and classic twelve-song track list, and each one is either recognisable or known to listeners who frequent The Beatles. Now and Then, Free As a Bird, and Real Love are the obvious trio of songs which Calico Skies depends on. Three songs The Beatles finished, one from 2023, but all formed with a desire to still feature John Lennon, despite his death.
Calico Skies sticks with that somewhat as it pulls songs from solo albums from across the post-Beatles years. Brainwashed, a song released after George Harrison’s death, is a sweet end to the album. Crucial to Calico Skies is a timeline. There are solo works from Paul McCartney featured here, but they are taken from Flaming Pie, a project the former Wings frontman had been working on at the time of the Anthology. There is a convincing overlap heard on this Beatles bootleg, and that’s half the battle. Let that convincing angle rush over you and enjoy what could have been another album from the Fab Four. Some bootleggers are not just competent with their releases but are capable of expanding the knowledge of a listener. This is very much the case for Calico Skies, a tremendous track list of strong songs, which does suggest The Beatles could have made an album without Lennon.
Calico Skies, unofficial it may be, is a suggestion of what the band could have done had the mid-1990s Anthology tapes spiralled into a full album session. The World Tonight feels like an inevitable follow-up to the freedom heard on Free As a Bird. There’s a nice contrast between the pair, the liberation of the first song and the paranoia of the second. A slightly different version of Now and Then is featured here, very strange to hear this early attempt from the band after the Lynne-produced success of the Grammy Award-winning final piece. It sounds fragile here, and that becomes a running theme through these songs, often stripped back. If not stripped back, then emotionally volatile and delicate. Rising Sun is a wonderful continuation of the Now and Then theme, that road of life being run and experiences coming to an end. All the more heavy-hitting given Lennon and Harrison’s deaths, but that much is inevitable for compilations recontextualising songs.
An excellent inclusion of Real Love underscores what Calico Skies is aiming to do. It’s a massive “what-if” but one worth answering. What if The Beatles had been interested in making a full-blown album when the surviving members got back into the studio? Calico Skies comes as close to answering that question as we could ever hope. Doing so is a tough task, but the inclusion of songs like Rocking Chair in Hawaii and Beautiful Night are sensible choices. Delightful, and for much of the time this album manages to get out ahead of other bootlegs. You can easily forget this is not a collection of Beatles songs from decades after Abbey Road. Part of that is the quality material each member would offer in their solo careers, but it’s magnificent to hear how they never lost their spark, and how their work could still fit together with a bit of heavy lifting from listeners.
