John Lennon - 1971 - Musician - The Beatles

Credit: Far Out / Alamy

The 1970 recording John Lennon always wanted to delete: “It was a lousy track”

Mon 4 May 2026 19:30, UK

John Lennon didn’t need much to start talking trash about the music that he created.

He didn’t claim to be one of the greatest artists in the world, and sometimes the greatest songs that he ever wrote tended to be the ones that got most of his ire whenever he started working on new music after the fact. He was constantly trying to push himself forward, but that didn’t mean that all of his records ended up getting strong enough to get his full approval, especially when he had the rest of The Beatles to bounce off of.

A lot of what Lennon did was already about trying to make the music sound as weird as possible, and sometimes ‘weird’ varies from one era to the next. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ already started off sounding like one of the strangest songs that the 1960s ever spat out, and yet Lennon seemed more than a little bit disappointed years after the fact when talking to George Martin about how he could possibly improve on some of the Fab Four’s greatest work from back in the day.

But when you look through a lot of his solo material, it’s like he knocked it out of the park every single time. Walls and Bridges was the portrait of a man reeling from the fact that he lost the love of his life for a while, and while he and Yoko Ono did eventually kiss and make up when they reunited in the late 1970s, you could tell that he was still going through a dark period when recording Rock ‘n’ Roll in the midst of his lost weekend. Those were rough hurdles for anyone to get over, but the end of The Beatles was forever going to be the biggest stumbling block of his career.

While all of the band members did at least find a way to move on and accept the fact that they weren’t going to be making music anymore, the fact that Let It Be came out completely ramshackle was always going to be a casualty. In a perfect world, the band would have easily been able to release whatever they wanted and maybe kept this one in the vault while they worked on Abbey Road, but that would have meant never getting to listen to a song like ‘Across the Universe’.

This was Lennon sounding as enlightened as he possibly could throughout every single phrase, and while he did have more than a little bit of weariness in his voice, that only helps the song. This was coming from the perspective of someone who had tried their best to reach inner peace, and when he sings about nothing that will ever change his world, he sounds more content with life than in any other song that he ever made.

And yet when you look at the way that the whole thing was mixed, Lennon was absolutely furious that he never got to make the record that sounded like what he heard in his head, saying, “It was a lousy track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it. It never went out as The Beatles; I gave it to the Wildlife Fund of Great Britain, and then when Phil Spector was brought in to produce Let It Be, he dug it out of the Beatles files and overdubbed it. The guitars are out of tune and I’m singing out of tune ’cause I’m psychologically destroyed.”

But even if Lennon sounded absolutely terrible in his own mind, that weariness is half the reason why the track works. The track is a little out of tune compared to everything else they had done, but that only serves to make it sound otherworldly, almost as if it’s coming from a completely different place in time altogether whenever those opening guitars come soaring in on the intro.

So while Lennon was always a bit wary of dishing out many compliments about his own voice, the fact that he couldn’t see the brilliance here is one of the reasons why all the Beatles worked so well. They needed reassurance from each other, and even if Lennon felt that Paul McCartney sabotaged him some of the time, there’s no reason to think that this song was anything less than perfect.