In this excerpt from Everything We Do is Music, Elizabeth Alker interviews Sir Paul McCartney about the roots of his studio innovations with the Beatles.

In 1966, Unit Delta Plus [an electronic music studio founded by Delia Derbyshire] were involved in an electronic music ‘happening’ at the Watermill Theatre near Newbury. It was attended by John Betjeman and billed, perhaps audaciously, as the first-ever concert of British electronic music. A year later, the collective also participated in the ‘Million Volt Light and Sound Rave’ at London’s Roundhouse on Chalk Farm Road. This event took place over two nights (28 January and 4 February 1967) and included a performance of tape music by Unit Delta Plus, as well as a playback of the Beatles’ legendary ‘Carnival of Light’, a fourteen-minute-long sound collage that is still unavailable to the public. ‘Carnival of Light’ came about thanks to an invitation from Paul McCartney’s friend and ‘cultural guide’ Barry Miles for the Beatles to participate in the Roundhouse show, and the music was taped in one evening during their sessions for ‘Penny Lane’.

‘I went into the studio when I knew the guys were all going to be there and I said, “Just before we start on our next song, can we do this little experiment?”’ Sir Paul McCartney is speaking to me on a velvet sofa in his London office, with the same irrepressible energy and enthusiasm that has driven his matchless contribution to pop music for over fifty years. I’m here to ask how such extracurricular pursuits informed the Beatles’ sound and the way they worked, and he is more than happy to oblige, teasing the fans who are still eager to hear this long-concealed piece with a little bit more information as to how it was written:

I said, ‘I’d just like us to wander around the studio and whenever you see any instrument or anything, hit it or just do something on it, but not a song, just kinda random noises.’ So that’s what we did for fifteen minutes. And that became ‘Carnival of Light’. We played it at the Roundhouse. And the sound engineers would get in on the fun too, because I’d say to them, ‘Just do anything.’ They’d put echoes on the recording, so, for instance, the drumbeat would go boom booom boooom booooom.

I was living in a top-floor flat at the time with my girlfriend, Jane Asher, the actress. And I had these two tape machines set up. So I would make a little tape loop by physically cutting a piece of tape and then joining it with glue. Say you’d recorded a guitar riff, it would go dum dum dum dum dum, then come back round on the tape loop. So the second time you could add to it, dum dum dum dum dum ding ding ding. On this machine there were three speeds. It had 7., on which you would normally work, and 3⅓, which would be an octave down. So now instead of dum dum dum, you had duuum duuum duuum. So you could play with that if you wanted that kind of slowed-down effect. Or if you wanted it sped up, you’d get diddle diddle dum dum dum dum. A mandolin sped up might even sound like a violin tremolo. When you played all these loops together you could make chords. My big ambition, although it would have taken forever, was to do a loop symphony. Just to really make people go ‘wooooahhh’. But there would be so much involved in doing that. So a lot of these ideas just stayed in my head because my day job was with the Beatles.

These attic experiments, while they did not take McCartney fully away from the ‘day job’, did start to change the way the Beatles worked in the studio. By twisting the ‘frequency correction switch’ on the Brenells, the band were able to speed guitar solos up to a pace at which they couldn’t physically play them. This was first the case with ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, McCartney tells me. George Harrison was struggling with the guitar part, so George Martin recommended he record it more slowly, at a manageable pace, and then speed it up to the desired pitch with the machine.

This set the band’s minds ablaze with technical ways to replace the guitar solo completely. ‘The aim was always to find something new to put in its place,’ McCartney says, and eventually the perfect opportunity to do this arrived: ‘There was a Beatles song called “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which was shaping up to be kind of a far-out song.’ McCartney remembers carrying a plastic bag full of tape loops (on which he’d recorded various sounds at home) to Abbey Road for the band’s sessions on the album Revolver:

I set up the tape machines to create popping, whirring and dissolving sounds all being mixed together. There could have been a guitar solo in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ – straightforward or wacky – but when you put the tape loops in they take it to another place because when they play, you get all these kinda happy accidents. They’re unpredictable, and that suited that track. We used those tricks to get the effect we wanted.

These ‘happy accidents’ McCartney refers to are the glitches in the tape or the workings of the tape machine: how the tape fades or erases bits as it continues to feed through the machine; the fabulous and fortuitous results that occur when speeding up or slowing down a tape loop; sounds that you didn’t expect appearing and enhancing the original ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ include a recording of McCartney’s laughter sped up to resemble the sound of seagulls, an orchestral chord, a mellotron played on its ‘flute’ setting, another mellotron on its ‘string’ setting, a sitar playing a rising scale but recorded with heavy saturation and sped up, and some of McCartney’s scuzzy, distorted guitar solo from the song ‘Taxman’, which is slowed down and reversed.

Our ears are engaged immediately, and then, flanked by the seagull sounds, Lennon’s vocals fly towards us, mesmeric and makutu-like. ‘Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,’ he sings, words taken from Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert’s book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and here made into one of the most alluring lyrics of all time. A chugging C chord – the song’s rhythmic drive – and the trance-inducing hums and buzzing of Indian classical music – introduced by George Harrison – make for a heady mix. The listener is coaxed into a transcendent state through meditative drones and a myriad of strange musical textures – a sonic vacuum into which all our troubled thoughts and feelings are swallowed up and disappear.

In addition to his encounter with Delia Derbyshire, McCartney was swimming in a scintillating swirl of countercultural ideas that were helping make London the swinging place it was at this time. He attended a lecture by the Italian composer and electronic experimentalist Luciano Berio, Derbyshire’s one-time collaborator, at the Italian Cultural Institute in London. The two later met, and Berio even arranged a series of songs by the Beatles for his first wife, the mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, as well as for the French group Les Swingle Singers (later the British Swingle Singers). In 1967, he published an article praising the Beatles in the Italian academic music journal Nuova rivista musicale italiana. McCartney also watched the communist and free improviser Cornelius Cardew play the prepared piano at the Royal College of Art in London. And, he tells me, another famous Beatles song took its cue from the 1956 piece Radio Music by John Cage:

One of Cage’s pieces started at one end of the radio, and he just turned the knob and went through to the end, scrolling randomly through all the radio stations. So I brought that idea to ‘I Am the Walrus’. I said, ‘It’s got to be random.’ We ended up landing on some Shakespeare, King Lear, but it was lovely having that spoken word at that moment. And that came from Cage.

George Martin was, of course, key in facilitating the Beatles’ studio adventures, and when it came to meddling with tape, the ease with which a tape machine could play material backwards made it one of Martin’s favourite gadgets.4 ‘It was George who would say, “You’ve got to think backwards,”’ McCartney recalls, revealing that Martin’s lodestar for this idea was Mozart, who would sometimes hold his music up to a mirror to inspire a change of creative direction. The Beatles took Martin’s advice, and soon ‘think backwards’ – an intrinsically subversive idea – became a recurring part of their process:

If a thing was getting a bit boring, I’d say to the engineer, ‘Play it backwards,’ because once you get into that, the possibilities are endless. George would educate us and teach us that, if you’re doing a guitar solo, you generally want to climax at the end of the solo. But of course, if it’s going to be reversed, you have to start with the climax and run out of steam at the end of it.

McCartney believes it was their unique working relationship with Martin, being open to his ideas and willing to try out-of-the-ordinary things, that made the Beatles special. ‘Because most other producers and bands would say, “Oh come on, get it on, play it real, we haven’t got time.” But we could go, “Wow! That’s something!” And we would latch on to it and experiment with it and say, “Can we put that on the record, George?”’

The redirection of the Beatles’ efforts, away from playing live and towards studio production, starting with the Revolver album, is now considered the reason they became a truly serious and world-conquering compositional force. But at the time of Revolver’s release in 1966, not everyone was happy to relax, turn off their minds and follow in the band’s psychedelic slipstream. Ray Davies from the Kinks, in his infamous 1966 review of Revolver for Disc and Music Echo magazine, wrote that the Beatles must have ‘had George Martin tied to a totem pole when they did this’, and fanzines were flooded with complaints from the band’s more conservative followers. I ask McCartney if the Beatles ever felt restricted by the fans who wanted non-stop sugary hits, when all they wanted to do was cut loose from the constraints of the conventional pop song. He tells me that by the mid-’60s he felt a real sense of freedom to engage with the open-minded atmosphere of the time, largely thanks to his late wife Linda. ‘She used to say, “It’s allowed.” And that lit up the skies for me. I’d think, “Yeah, it’s allowed.”’

So the Beatles continued to loop and spool their way towards an entirely new era for pop music, and eventually John Lennon purchased his own pair of Brenell machines. McCartney was certainly the first of the Beatles to make inroads into the avant-garde, but while ‘John was fascinated . . . he loved the craziness of it’, McCartney’s aim was always to pull at the seams of pop’s fabric rather than to rip up the rule book entirely. ‘I never wanted to make an album of avant-garde ideas, I always wanted to put this stuff on a bed of something that I liked and that was perhaps more musical. That was the ultimate sound that I wanted to hear.’

Lennon, as we know, employed new studio techniques to their most extreme effects, producing tracks such as the bewildering and hypnotic eight-and-a-half-minute-long ‘Revolution 9’. McCartney preferred to use his Brenell machines, and other new gadgets he found in the mixing rooms at Abbey Road, ‘in a controlled way’, working within the pop song format, cherry-picking interesting stylistic elements and twisting them into the Beatles’ established songwriting template. Together the pair fashioned a new, intelligent and avant-garde-informed kind of pop music. It’s a reminder, as if we need it, of the magic of the Lennon–McCartney partnership: the push and pull of McCartney’s tireless commitment to the creation of new music and the possibilities offered by new studio technology, and Lennon’s conceptual approach and interest in artistic hinterlands and fringe ideas. Two genius creatives united in their mission to overturn the status quo. ‘You can get so boxed in,’ says McCartney.

You think, ‘Oh well, our audience wants a pop song.’ And then you might read about William Burroughs using the cut-up technique and you think, ‘Well, he had an audience, and his audience liked what he did.’ And eventually we decided that our audiences would come along with us, rather than it being down to us to feed them a conventional diet.

There are plenty of parallels to be drawn between Burroughs’s cut-up technique and the cutting, splicing and mixing of tape loops in the Beatles’ music. Both result in the collision, juxtaposition and parody of established ideas. In the Beatles’ music we hear recordings removed from their original context and intended meaning, and subsequently upended and often lampooned in their new musical setting. McCartney tells me he was aware of the aesthetic similarities between what he was doing with tape and recorded sound and the ways in which other countercultural artists of the era were working with collages of words and pictures. He points to a Willem de Kooning painting next to us on the wall in his office, and compares the Beatles’ compositional approach to de Kooning’s abstraction of shapes and objects. However, when it comes to the more philosophical and subversive ideas behind the Beatles’ songwriting and production methods, McCartney says, very modestly, ‘That was more John,’ although it’s clear he was also entirely mindful of the band’s ability to access, through sound, those corners of our subconscious that are rarely explored; the truths hidden beneath the surface; the untethered creative parts of ourselves that are often left dormant.

Not everything we see is clear and figurative. Sometimes when you’re asleep or you rub your eye, you see an abstract. Your mind knows about it. We know about this stuff. It was the same with music. We were messing around, but our minds could still accept it because it was something that we already kind of knew anyway. Even though we were in another lane to more classical composers, we were kind of equal in that we also wanted freedom.

The Beatles led audiences in their droves towards the edges of the avant-garde and the establishment-unsettling art music conceived by some of the twentieth century’s greatest classical musicians. The work of these composers and the ideas of the pre-eminent thinkers, philosophers, engineers, writers and artists of the day were then packaged up in pop form. ‘We brought it to the attention of the public,’ McCartney agrees, ‘and then we hoped people would be inspired by that and go out and do their own thing.’

Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop by Elizabeth Alker is out now in hardback, audio and ebook.

Images in this article:

• Elizabeth Alker with Sir Paul McCartney, courtesy of the author
• Karlheinz Stockhausen October 1994 in the Studio for Electronic Music of WDR Cologne