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Hello and welcome to Nothing Is Real, a podcast about the Beatles.

Everybody thinks they know the Beatles, but how much do we really know?

My name's Jason Carty.

My name's Stephen Corkroft.

And we're live on a hard drive from Dublin and Belfast.

When you look back at the Beatles' productive 1960s, certain years tend to get codified in a certain way.

1964, they take over America.

1969, they fall apart, but they leave us with Abbey Road.

We look a little closer in detail at certain bubbles of time. It can get more interesting on a previous episode we looked at the January 1970s session. Today, we're going back to the first few weeks of

1968. The macro view, the big view of 1968, is that they start to fragment in the process of delivering

the white album and on all things Apple related. But the weeks at the start of 1968, before they head

off to Rishi Keshe on the 15th of February, it paints a different picture. And that's the little

area we're going to look at today. It doesn't really, that start of 1968 doesn't really tell you what

1968 is going to be, does it, Stephen? No, it seems, for my money, it sits apart from

the rest of the year. They're coming off sort of extreme highs and lows in 1967 with

pepper, with all you need is love, with the death of Brian Epstein. The beginning of 68, they're very much involved with the Maharishi and meditation.

They're planning their trip to India.

And they seem to me this is probably the last point at which they're all on the same page.

They're all very focused. They've all completely bought in to one degree

or another into transcendental meditation. They see this is the way forward and that's their focus.

Yeah. And so let's look at the state of affairs right at the end of 67 because again,

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