The tapes looped into The Beatles’ song ‘Revolution 9’
During his tenure co-writing for The Beatles with Paul McCartney, John Lennon developed an innovative and multi-faceted approach to songwriting. In complex, beat generation-inspired compositions like ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ and ‘A Day in the Life’, he straddled the line between experimentalism and pop. Meanwhile, songs like ‘Revolution 9’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ shone a light into the future.
The Beatles’ more oblique and kaleidoscopic material began to filter through in the mid-1960s. Although they couldn’t be cited as the sole progenitors of psychedelic rock, as one of its leading figures, they did perhaps the most in spreading its charm worldwide.
By the time The Beatles started recording material for The Beatles – or “The White Album”, as it’s more commonly known, in 1968, they already had Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the bag. As the cover suggests, this sprawling new release lost a touch of psychedelic colour but maintained its fair share of bizarre material.
While we have McCartney to blame for ‘Rocky Raccoon’ and ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, Lennon dropped a few oddballs into the works. Most memorably, Lennon added a reprise of sorts to his side four opener, ‘Revolution 1’. Abandoning the conventions heard in its parent composition, the album’s penultimate song, ‘Revolution 9’, raised a few eyebrows upon its arrival.
At a patience-testing eight minutes and 22 seconds in length, ‘Revolution 9′ remains one of The Beatles’ most divisive songs, but length isn’t the usual topic of conversation. Lennon decided to put his avant-garde sensibilities to the test in this composition, splicing and looping a series of mostly non-musical recordings into a trippy soundscape.
The song comprises 12 effects tapes, some created by Lennon and others obtained from the Abbey Road archives. According to Mark Lewisohn’s book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, five were marked ‘Various’; the others were titled ‘Vicars Poems’, ‘Queen’s Mess’, ‘Come Dancing Combo’, ‘Organ Last Will Test’, ‘Neville Club’, ‘Theatre Outing’ and ‘Applause/TV Jingle’.
In David Sheff’s All We Are Saying, Lennon explained how he composed the track. “We were cutting up classical music and making different-size loops, and then I got an engineer tape on which some test engineer was saying, ‘Number nine, number nine, number nine,'” he recalled. “All those different bits of sound and noises are all compiled. There were about ten machines with people holding pencils on the loops – some only inches long and some a yard long. I fed them all in and mixed them live.”
“I did a few mixes until I got one I liked,” he continued. “Yoko was there for the whole thing, and she made decisions about which loops to use. It was somewhat under her influence, I suppose. Once I heard her stuff – not just the screeching and the howling but her sort of word pieces and talking and breathing and all this strange stuff, I thought, ‘My God,’ I got intrigued, so I wanted to do one. I spent more time on ‘Revolution 9’ than I did on half the songs I ever wrote. It was a montage.”
Lennon used Abbey Road Studios’ cutting-edge STEED (single tape echo and echo delay) reverb system for ‘Revolution 9’. They allegedly ran out of delay five minutes and 11 seconds into the live composition, at which point, you can hear the tape being rewound.
See the main list of tapes used and hear ‘Revolution 9’ below.
The tapes heard in ‘Revolution 9’:
- George Martin saying, ‘Geoff, put the red light on,’ looped with heavy echo
- A choir accompanied by backwards violins
- Extracts from a symphony orchestral performance, edited and rearranged, and played backwards
- A repeated sample from the orchestral overdub for ‘A Day In The Life’, recorded on February 10th, 1967
- A Mellotron, performed by Lennon and played backwards
- Various extracts from symphony and operatic recordings
- The final chord from Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony
- High-pitched humming by Yoko Ono
- Lennon and George Harrison whispering six times the phrase, ‘There ain’t no rule for the company freaks’
- ‘Number nine’ announcement
