‘I Am The Walrus’ – The Beatles
Any Beatles fan knew that the band would be doing something a little bit abnormal once they made the studio their new home. They had spent the last few years making songs that didn’t always translate live, and while they tried their best, deciding not to test the boundaries of the live stage with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was probably a smart choice. Most people knew to expect the unexpected, but ‘I Am the Walrus’ was the swan dive off the edge that the band never returned from.
After the acid-soaked experiment on Sgt Pepper, John Lennon turned in the kind of song ripped straight out of Alice in Wonderland. From the strange looping chord sequence to the nonsense lyrics, the song packs in some of the most obscure ideas anyone had ever thought of, whether that’s the looping chord sequence or having the radio randomly play Shakespeare midway through the song. Anyone would have been delirious after going through this song in one sitting, but listening through again, rarely has a song with this many weird quirks behind it had so much swagger to it as well.