500 Greatest Albums of the 1960s…Deluxe edition

Fab (and more) gear!

With the new updated editions of the Beatles Anthology in the shops and on your streaming service this week, this feels like the right time to bring you a deluxe expanded edition of our 500 Greatest Albums of the 1960s…Ranked magazine. Plenty of Beatles, yes. But also now with more Love, more Nick Drake, and more Kinks.

If you’re reading this you’ve possibly already got a decent hold on the best music of the 1960s, but best-of lists do change over time. Uncut last compiled one around a decade ago, but even since then our 2023 vote for this magazine revealed some interesting shifts in the landscape of critical opinion. The 1960s is still an area of outstanding musical beauty, don’t worry about that, but there has been some movement of the earth.

Without giving too much away, we’re all clearly still considering precisely which Beatles album is the one we think is the best. Jazz, once only represented in countdown lists by one or two records, is now here in greater breadth (and depth). The changing fortunes of The Doors and the Syd-era Floyd show that what goes up – even very high – can also, over time, come down.

We’ve written pithily, and in increasing depth, about the best 500 albums of the 1960s. The classics you love. The genre outliers you should try (like AMM’s AMMMusic, a key one for both Syd and for McCartney) Some lesser-known gems (everybody needs the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack, it turns out).

There can only be one winner in a list like this, but the real story here is about a creative community. The Byrds listening to Coltrane. The Beatles listening to The Beach Boys. Everybody listening to Bob Dylan.

“We try to be as varied as possible,” Paul McCartney tells NME in 1966. “On the next LP there’s a track with Ringo doing a children’s song, and another with electronic sounds…” And that’s not even the half of it.

The mag’s in the shop on Friday but you can get yours here now. The current issue Uncut with our extensive Anthology cover story is in shops or here. Watch this space for more Anthology business as the show launches!