Sam Neill names the most important song ever written: “Always breaking new ground”
Appearing in everything from the unforgettable divorce horror Possession to the blockbuster thriller Jurassic Park, Sam Neill has a pretty varied resumé. The New Zealand-born actor can be seen in a variety of films that have emerged since the late 1970s, with his breakthrough coming with Sleeping Dogs.
Yet, just like many actors, he has a deep appreciation for another art form: music.
He seems to have a music taste as varied as his taste in movie roles, and he once revealed some of his favourite songs, ranging from ‘This Mess We’re In’ by PJ Harvey and Thom Yorke to ‘Long and Wasted Years’ by Bob Dylan and ‘East Harlem’ by Beirut. The actor also selected tracks by the likes of Radiohead, Bon Iver, Wilco, and Arcade Fire in conversation with Two Paddocks. While Neill’s good taste might take some people off guard (maybe in another life, Neill could be a 6 Music dad), there’s one universally loved band that he believes reinvented music altogether.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Neill is a massive fan of The Beatles. It’s hard to imagine a world without the Fab Four (well, Danny Boyle tried, and failed miserably), because their influence is just too mammoth. All of Neill’s favourite bands wouldn’t exist without them, simply due to their pioneering approach to music, which saw them use new recording techniques and blends of genres. They incited a never-before-seen celebrity phenomenon, Beatlemania, which has since echoed through the annals of pop history, its influence inescapable.
There’s one song of theirs, however, which he believes stands out as their most important contribution to music, even though this is a hotly debated topic. Could it be ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, with its hallucinatory atmosphere that really defined the band’s effortless knack for experimentation? Or how about ‘Helter Skelter’, a proto-metal song?
Talking to Jim Mora for Sunday Morning on RNZ, Neill said, “It’s easy to forget now how each successive Beatles album, how much we looked forward to them because they were always breaking new ground.” It’s incredible to imagine being alive for the release of each new Beatles album – something that happened at a rapid pace in the 1960s – and Neill was lucky enough to experience that as a teenager.
In the space of a decade, the band went from making lighthearted poppy cuts to wildly experimental tracks that ranged from hard rock to musique concrète, proving their brilliance as the ultimate musical masters. Explaining, “That first track, that’s the song I’ve chosen, ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. With that song and that record, you realised that pop had moved into something completely different.”
So, while it might not be his all-time favourite Beatles song, he knew they were going to go down in history as musical heroes as soon as he heard that track back in 1967.
The album of the same name was their eighth, but here they did something that really took the wind out of many listeners. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is considered one of the greatest records ever made, marking a landmark moment in this blossoming ‘album era’ that would change music forever.
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