Perhaps the most immediate reaction to the proposal to consider the recordings of the Beatles in the light of Marshall McLuhan's commentaries on the media is to register surprise that this has not been attempted before. Both are indelibly associated with the 1960s: the Beatles through their record releases from ‘Love Me Do’ (1962) to Let It Be (1970); McLuhan through his significant publications of that decade – The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964) and The Medium Is The Massage (1967). Both made important contributions to our understandings of the possibilities embedded in communications technology: McLuhan as a theorist, the Beatles as practitioners. Both have been subjected to levels of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation that go far beyond conventional reflections about academics or musicians. And the work and reputations of both occupied the shifting ground between the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘popular’ in a way that posed awkward questions about cultural hierarchy.

Having asserted, correctly, that ‘the Beatles' music, though well written and almost always enjoyable, is not the sole source of the public's enduring fascination’ (p. 4), MacFarlane explains that ‘it is the premise of this book that the Beatles' engagement of electric technology via the medium of multi-track recording is the source of the metaphor of universality commonly attributed to their music […] thus, their works resonate with Marshall McLuhan's ideas regarding the transition into an electrical world of “all-at-once-ness”’ (pp. 8–9). Specifically, he concentrates on the ways in which multi-track recordings ‘bypass the visual enclosure of alphabetic writing and print, and allow for an engagement of figure (sound) and ground (place) as well as their dynamic interplay’ (p. 31). Put simply, the passage from acoustic to visual awareness (perceptual and representational) that was confirmed historically by the invention of the printing press has been substantially reversed through the emphasis placed by multi-track recordings on the auditory spaces between sounds (which cannot be adequately reproduced on a printed score) as well as the sounds themselves.

But, however beguiling the projected explorations might appear, they are hampered by the lack of a familiar, common vocabulary that can give equal weight and clarity to the Beatles' music and McLuhan's arguments. MacFarlane is clearly aware of this, and it soon becomes uncomfortably apparent. For example, his chosen method of musical analysis is a tripartite ‘mosaic’ approach, which combines organisational, phenomenological and interpretive assessments of Beatles' tracks; during his detailed discussions of selected songs from the group's studio years (‘A Day In The Life’, ‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘I Am The Walrus’, ‘Revolution’, ‘Revolution 1’, ‘Revolution 9’) the explanatory paragraph in which he outlines the characteristics of the approach is repeated – almost word-for-word – on six separate occasions. His presentation of McLuhan's ‘Tetrad’ (a set of questions to be directed at technological artefacts) is marked by similar multiple repetition. While the intent may be to refresh the reader's understanding, the effect is to produce a commentary that is curiously sterile; the mechanical interruptions tend to detract from the ideas expressed, and obscure what is undoubtedly an ambitious and original project.

However, the book does contain some significant observations. MacFarlane's claim that ‘the Beatles' primary metier was not music but recorded sound’ (p. 3) is more than a semantic distinction, and invites a reappraisal of the group's status as performers, musicians and technicians; his account of ‘All You Need Is Love’ within the Our World television broadcast in June 1967 allows the author to demonstrate how the Beatles' participation in the ‘global village’ described by McLuhan made obsolete ‘the distinctions between here and there, between now and then, and between live performance and recorded sound […] as part of a global broadcast in which the performance space is the entire planet’ (p. 65); his depiction of the mono and stereo elements running through ‘I Am The Walrus’ as examples of ‘hot’ (mono) and ‘cool’ (stereo) media (p. 103) offers a useful illustration of McLuhan's usage of the terms; and his application of the ‘Tetrad’ to the perennial question of the Beatles' break-up concludes with a novel expression of a familiar tale: ‘the Beatles as a group reverses (flips) into the individual abstracted from the group […] the original ground dissolves as each figure (Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr) generates, or becomes a part of, a new field of action (ground)’ (p. 110).

The Beatles and McLuhan is a short book, containing just over 100 pages of MacFarlane's own text. It is completed by the inclusion of three transcribed conversations: a CBS-TV interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from December 1969; Lennon and Ono in conversation with McLuhan, also from December 1969; and the author's interview with McLuhan's son Michael, conducted in March 2012. While it is always valuable to have the comments of the leading actors themselves, neither of the first two conversations relates directly to the book's arguments. In fact, this may not be surprising, given Michael McLuhan's recollections of his father's meeting with Lennon and Ono: ‘He would just get an idea, stop listening, and had to say it. And they were very patient. They let him say something, and then they would say something, and then he'd come up with something totally unrelated, and then they'd say their thing’ (p. 155). What is undeniably surprising, given his father's provocative contributions to debates around media and cultural trends throughout the 1960s, is his admission that ‘I don't think he would have studied the Beatles in any sense. He certainly wouldn't have listened to them’ (p. 157).

While MacFarlane's emphasis on multi-track recordings is consistent and informative, it would certainly gain from an appropriate contextualisation: there are, for example, no references to any other musicians or records from the same period. Furthermore, there remains much to be said about the manner in which additional facets of the Beatles' career might illuminate McLuhan's observations and predictions: the spectacularly successful recordings of their pre-studio years, their film and TV appearances, the simulation of audience interaction in their later ‘virtual’ performances, their unprecedented global presence, their historical legacy. In that sense, this book does not deliver a wholly convincing thesis. Rather, it presents a progressive hypothesis whose recurrent assertion – that the Beatles' manipulation of advances in music technology helped to facilitate the creation of a simultaneous global community and the transition into a post-literate electric age – remains, for the moment, incomplete.