Junior Parker

One of the many soul records hiding in many a hip-hop DJ’s record collection—sampled by everybody from DJ Shadow, Cypress Hill, A Tribe Called Quest, and De La Soul—Mississippi blues singer Junior Parker may not enjoy quite the same lauded acclaim as his 1960s soul contemporaries, but 1971’s Love Ain’t Nothin’ But A Business Goin’ On has enjoyed a cult audience on the R&B fringes.

Boasting covers such as ‘Lady Madonna’ and ‘Taxman’, Parker audaciously tackled ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ as the album’s closer. Eschewing complex production techniques for a zen-like exercise in pensive contemplation, Parker swaps LSD for meditative enlightenment and spins a cover which imbues Deep South balladry with a dose of stirring spirituality. An intriguing exercise in restraint, Parker reimagines the acid-fried original like a rustic old workers’ song passed down through oral tradition.

Screamfeeder

Veterans of Australian indie, Brisbane’s Screamfeeder were a Triple J radio favourite across the 1990s, playing the country’s Big Day Out festival numerous times and supporting everyone from the Rollins Band to Pavement. Stuck in label complications, the band sought to drop an EP exclusively filled with covers of the artists they loved.

As is seemingly tradition for Lennon’s LSD coda, their ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ closes 1999’s Home Age with a fitting conclusive mystery. Saturated in bleached alternative rock and a coating of late 1990s digital crunch, Screamfeeder’s sideways interpretation buries the song’s heady thematic core underneath packed sediments of layers of noise and metallic screech. Its Kellie Lloyd’s floating vocals which keep the piece anchored toward a hypnagogic plane, and the shoegaze slather dolloped all over—coupled with Lloyd’s manic laughter—imbues the track with a hazardous bite.

The Chameleons

One of Manchester’s most-loved cult bands, The Chameleons offered a much sharper and stirring counter to some of dreampop’s soggy ambient tendencies, conjuring giant slabs of shimmering synths and keys bolstered by a fierce guitar attack. Taking the expansive sense of cinema pioneered by early U2 records, frontman Mark Burgess deftly scored a variant of 1980s post-punk that straddled ethereal without losing its edge.

Having already imbued 1985’s ‘Singing Rule Britannia (While The Walls Close In)’ with the haunted echoes of ‘She Said, She Said’, Burgess and the band waded further into The Beatles’ lysergic mist and added a touch of icy gothic drama to their artful take. Surreal but spiked with an air of danger and disquiet, The Chameleons shape ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ toward an air of desolate rumination, scoring the same strange entities that adorn the 1986 eerie cover released around the same time.

Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston

There are many Anglophile Beatle nuts that pepper the American music world, but no one comes close to lo-fi outsider artist Daniel Johnston. Having boasted of spending thousands of dollars on Beatles bootlegs and even penning a namesake tribute song on 1983’s Yip/Jump Music, Liverpool’s finest hold an enormous feature in Johnston’s life and musical universe as much as his comic book characters and in former art classmate and lifelong muse Laurie Allen’s life.

Collaborating with Half Japanese’s Jad Fair during a poor mental health period, the pair tackled Revolver‘s enduring cut, among other covers from Rodgers and Hammerstein. Featured on 1989’s It’s Spooky, their take pursues uneasy minimalism with skewed martial drums and terse keyboards, starkly illustrating the fraught conditions of its making. With Johnston’s Christian faith colouring his psychosis at the time, the closing yelps of avoiding the “demons” in the void—an allusion to the track’s original working title—grips with its intense sincerity.

801

Following Roxy Music‘s first hiatus in 1976, guitarist Phil Manzanera collaborated with synth Svengali Brian Eno—who had left three years earlier—along with numerous musicians across Matching Mole, Curved Air and Quiet Sun to form an experimental supergroup. They were initially only set to play three special shows—one in Norfolk, that year’s Reading Festival, and London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in Southbank. Soaking up the progressive electronics that were crafted among West Germany’s kosmiche community, 801 conjured similarly shimmering and complex rhymic journeys into spacey jazz-rock.

Ever dependable for an intelligent angle on anything that takes his fancy, Eno’s smart deconstruction of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ from potent ephemerality to alien traversal captures the more introspective odyssey that comes with acid. Everybody playing with locked-in groove and nebulous synergy, 801’s ‘TNK’ succeeds more than most as a true harnessing of Lennon-McCartney’s source material but extracting its mystical core to push the piece into farther exotic reaches.