The secret message in the 1983 ELO song ‘Secret Messages’
Hiding a secret message for someone else to stumble upon is an incredibly satisfying task to undertake, and it’s made all the more satisfying when someone manages to crack the code and discovers your little easter egg.
They can serve all sorts of purposes as well, from simply being playful and hiding a friendly greeting message to slyly revealing your discontent with something through a cleverly disguised cypher. Either way, there’s a cheekiness to the art form, whether it’s used for comedy or protest.
Music has long provided fertile ground for that kind of mischief. Beyond simply writing songs, artists have often enjoyed turning recordings into puzzles, rewarding attentive listeners with hidden references, coded messages and inside jokes tucked beneath the surface.
Backmasking, or in simpler terms, playing a recorded sound backwards, is one of the most common methods of hiding a secret message within music and has been utilised by many artists over time. Rob Halford of heavy metal titans Judas Priest landed himself in hot water and was taken to court over the use of backmasking to deliver subliminal messages in the song ‘Love Bites’, which features the phrase “in the dead of the night, love bites” when played forwards.
The controversy surrounding backmasking only increased its appeal. Once audiences became aware that secret messages could theoretically be hidden inside recordings, listeners began searching for them everywhere, sometimes finding meanings that were never intended in the first place.
Art rock duo, The Fiery Furnaces, put backmasked vocals all over their 2006 album Bitter Tea, and Avey Tare of Animal Collective went one step further and released Pullhair Rubeye in 2007 alongside his then-wife Kría Brekkan, an album played entirely in reverse.
One act that was notorious for hiding messages in their music was the Electric Light Orchestra, whether that was in the form of backmasking or simply having a hard-to-hear robotic voice instructs the listener to flip the record over at the end of ‘Mr Blue Sky’. Given their love for hiding things in their songs, perhaps it would have been funnier if their 1983 track ‘Secret Messages’ didn’t actually have any secret messages at all, but the reality is that it did. In fact, it had multiple messages.
The first instance is pretty obvious, as the track opens the album of the same name with a backmasked voice. If played forward as it would have originally been recorded, you’ll be able to hear Jeff Lynne gently whispering the phrase “Welcome to the show”. It’s a cute little addition to the song, if a little corny, and highlights the playfulness that Lynne loved to incorporate into ELO’s music.
The second instance is less noticeable, but anyone who is au fait with outdated telecommunications methods might have been able to spot the bonus message hidden just after the intro. What might just sound like a series of synthesised beeps to the untrained ear is actually morse code, and when fully analysed, it spells out three simple letters – E, L and O.
This is something that the band had previously done 10 years prior on ‘Ocean Breakup/King of the Universe’, and is far from the only time a band has used the admittedly quite nerdy feature of morse code in song. Rush famously spelt out the name of the song ‘YYZ’ in a complex 10/8 riff on their 1981 album Moving Pictures, signifying the airport identification code for their home city of Toronto.
While ELO and Rush’s use of subliminal messaging is rather tame and inoffensive compared to other instances in popular culture, they’re still fun for those with bat-like hearing to pick out. That being said, nothing beats using subliminal messaging for more anarchic purposes, such as devil worship or having a sly dig at someone. Not that I’d ever do either of those.
Ultimately, ELO’s use of secret messages says as much about Jeff Lynne’s personality as it does about the technology available at the time. Rather than treating the recording studio as merely a place to capture performances, he viewed it as a playground filled with possibilities. Whether through backwards whispers, coded beeps or tongue-in-cheek instructions hidden between songs, ELO understood that sometimes the most memorable parts of a record are the details listeners weren’t supposed to notice straight away.
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