When The Beatles took over the studio, the sky was the limit as to where their music could go.
They were no longer those four lovable goofballs that ran around in circles in A Hard Day’s Night, and they would let everyone know that they were true artists. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t have some fun when they discovered backmasking.
Because if the band sounded incredible when heard the right way around, John Lennon had a revelation when he first listened to his music being played in reverse. While the technique was discovered by complete accident when he took the demo tape of ‘Rain’ and put it the wrong way around, that strange sound of the human voice singing in reverse was bound to fun to try out on other instruments, whether that was the backwards guitar solo on ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ or the soaring harmonies on the studio take of ‘Rain’.
However, the music world isn’t short of a few sceptics, and the Fab Four started to embrace the psychedelic movement, people were coming out of the woodwork trying to find patterns in their backwards moments. Sure, they could have easily made them because it sounded weird, but some listeners with nothing better to do or with a massive stick up their ass were convinced that they were trying to give their fans messages.
A lot of the controversy surrounding backwards music might originate from harder rock acts like Led Zeppelin, but for as long as the ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy has existed, there have been dissections around what the Fab Four were trying to say. So, for theories that have existed for years, do the sceptics have a few valid arguments when you play some of their backwards music forward?
Did The Beatles actually hide backwards messages in their songs?
The short answer: absolutely not.
The band certainly had a lot of fun messing around with tape loops and reversed sounds, but a lot of it comes down to them wanting to create a specific sound for a song rather than anything else. In fact, ‘I Am the Walrus’ and ‘Glass Onion’ almost feel like specific retorts Lennon wrote to people like this who wanted to read way too much into what they had been doing.
Though some are a bit of a stretch, like “Turn me on dead man” being heard on ‘Revolution 9’, a handful of them strangely align with the song. Towards the end of ‘Rain’, you can hear pieces of the band singing the line ‘When the sun shines’, and since rain is practically a reversed version of sunshine, you could probably chalk that one up to being a happy accident that happened to survive to the final version.
In fact, the only legitimate backwards message the band put in their music came long after the fact when making ‘Free As A Bird’, using bits and pieces from Lennon’s recordings and tacking it on at the end where he says the words “turned out nice again, didn’t it”. Since they only had so much to work with using Lennon’s old demos, this little Easter egg may as well be them tipping a cap to their old mate who never got to see their true reunion.
There are a lot of avenues that people have gone down since The Beatles discovered backwards music, but whereas some bands did hide some messages later on, the Fabs were simply there to have a laugh using their new discovery. And considering how gung-ho some people were to accuse the band of saying something nefarious to their fans on their backwards recordings, chances are the accusers were even more stoned than the band were.