It's getting better all the time. That's the general idea of the new spruced-up Beatles reissues: after a 22-year wait, the Fab Four's original catalogue has been digitally remastered for the first time and is finally available across the universe.

It is a moot point what John Lennon would have thought of the concept of Beatles' fans being asked to buy albums that they already bought decades before. He appeared to harbour a crushing indifference -- if not outright loathing -- of the band's gargantuan worldwide audience. He told a Rolling Stone journalist in 1970: "F*****g bastards, sucking us to death."

Lennon also told Beatles' biographer Philip Norman that the millions of fans "give us the freedom to con them".

But, hey, Lennon also blamed his fondness for smack on "what the Beatles and their pals were doing to us", so you might want to take a certain amount of what Lennon said in hindsight about The Beatles with a pinch of something white and crystalline.

Then again, according to David Quantick's The Making Of The Beatles' White Album, Paul McCartney went out of his way in the studio to make the rest of the band feel that their input was almost irrelevant. Lennon in the book is quoted as saying: "We'd take hours on his songs then just knock off ours."

Legend has it that Lennon hated McCartney (whom Lennon accused of making nothing but "granny music" with the Beatles) so much that by the time The Beatles split up he threw a brick through McCartney's window. This little nugget is in Albert Goldman's necrophilia-friendly The Lives of John Lennon.

"Paul's ego was too great to tolerate a musical equal," Allen Klein said of McCartney. "Everybody thinks I'm an aggressor," Macca is believed to have said at the time, "but I just want out."

Before all that, before the bitterness destroyed them, The Beatles went, in Lennon's immortal phrase, "to the toppermost of the poppermost." These four young men from England changed the world. As NME noted, they invented dance music with Tomorrow Never Knows or metal with Helter Skelter and trippy psychedelia with Sergeant Pepper, and so forth and so on.

They invented the Sixties, and pop culture, while they were at it. On February 9, 1964, when Ed Sullivan introduced them on his TV show with the words: "Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles! Let's bring them on!", it was like he was talking directly to the world. Sadly, it was a short time after that the band began to fall apart. On January 30, 1969, they made their last public appearance, a show on the roof of Apple Records in London. Within a year, they might just have fallen off that roof as McCartney sued to dissolve the band as a legal entity, in December 1970.

There has been a lot of water (and bad blood) under the bridge since then. Lennon and George have passed. Macca has even patched up his differences with Yoko Ono. And now this.

Asked why after so many years he choose to let it happen (all you need is loot? surely not?), McCartney answered: "People said: 'We can do remastering' and we said 'Why?' and they said, 'Well, we can get it much better now.' You know those DVDs where they've restored them? You see Bambi dirty and then clean. It's a bit along those lines, they show us it and we go, 'Wow'. We just make sure it's right. That's really our involvement.'"

The question surely is: was there any pressing need to correct those old recordings. Paul replied: "Not really. I'm very happy with The Beatles' output. That's probably an understatement. I think we were a pretty hot band, really. I'm not a high-tech kind of person. They always sound good to me even if it's on a trannie on the beach."

In 2004, Elvis Costello wrote a piece for Rolling Stone, outlining his enduring love for The Beatles. He recalled performing with Paul in 1999. "During the rehearsal, I was singing harmony on a Ricky Nelson song, and Paul called out the next tune: 'All My Loving.' I said, 'Do you want me to take the harmony line the second time round?' And he said, 'Yeah, give it a try.' I'd only had 35 years to learn the part. It was a very poignant performance, witnessed only by the crew and other artists on the bill," wrote Costello. "At the show, it was very different. The second he sang the opening lines -- 'Close your eyes, and I'll kiss you' -- the crowd's reaction was so intense that it all but drowned the song out. It was very thrilling but also rather disconcerting. Perhaps I understood in that moment one of the reasons why the Beatles had to stop performing. The songs weren't theirs anymore. They were everybody's."

Now more than ever.