Alternate Universe Albums

The Scandal Sessions

"...and so, due to the numerous and blatant controversies surrounding most of the track-listing, we as a company cannot and will not be able to release the record under our label.

We understand this may cause grievances among you all, and we wish we could help, but there is unfortunately nothing we can do but request that you redo the album, this time with less controversial material.

We look forward to seeing what you come back with.

Best wishes,

The team at EMI Records."

This is an excerpt of a letter received by The Beatles in 1975. It wasn't just any letter, however. It was a letter sent by EMI Records, who announced that they were rejecting 'Scandal', The Beatles would-be 16th studio album.

The news highly angered and disappointed The Beatles, who, as history had long suggested, went back and erased everything to start anew.

However, recently, it was discovered that history had been wrong.

Producer Giles Martin, who has been remixing The Beatles' catalogue for the past 8 years now, made a remarkable discovery while searching the vaults at EMI last year.

He had gone into the vaults looking for outtakes and such for the remix of 'Symphony No. 16'. What he found, however, was piles and piles of dusty tapes that hadn't been touched in decades. Upon listening back to the tapes, it was quickly apparent that Martin had just stumbled upon one of the greatest finds in music history.

As it turned out, The Beatles had, in reality, accidentally erased only demos and outtakes, the exact opposite of what Giles had been looking for. This left the original 'Scandal' exactly how it was sent to EMI, forgotten to history.

Now, officially presented for the first time in history, with input from the surviving members of the band, 'The Scandal Sessions' attempts to reconstruct what 'Scandal' could have been.

As no track list has officially been found, the band members had to go off of memory alone. While not entirely a reliable source, Paul McCartney commented that 'it's incredibly close to how we had it, I think. It's almost as if we've snatched it right out of the seventies'.

What was also found was evidence of the long-fabled sessions between The Beatles and The Beach Boys. 'Riot In Cell Block #9' was produced from a mostly-instrumental jam session between the two bands for unknown reasons. What was even more strange was the sound-collage-esque news castings and political speeches on top. This leads researchers to believe this is where the name 'Scandal' came from.

The album is dedicated to the late John Lennon and George Harrison, whose compositions 'Imagine' and 'Give Me Love', respectively, had been widely bootlegged and praised as some of their finest works.

Critics praised 'The Scandal Sessions' across the board, saying it 'breathed new life into a band over 60 years old'. Rolling Stone awarded it 'The Best Reissue Of The Year' for 2025, while the album won a Grammy award for 'Best Historical Album'.