The Beatles record Sean Ono Lennon admires the most: “The birth of psychedelic music”
Say what you will about The Beatles in today’s musical climate, but no one can ever dispute the unimaginable impact they had on the entire landscape of modern music.
After all, many trace prog-rock’s roots back to the Fab Four’s incredibly forward-thinking work on Revolver, and to the first refinement of the modern concept album with the glorious body of work that is Sgt Pepper. Alongside psychedelic rock, traces of which are littered across almost all records, the sounds and styles of pop-rock in the modern scene have a lot to do with everything the Liverpudlian quarter did to revolutionise the simple art of music.
Perhaps this is why a lot of people claim Revolver to be their best record, not only because it was a major turning point that proved they were more about artistic experimentation than mainstream success, but also because it holds pretty much everything you’d ever want from a Beatles album, ticking every box that made them the sharpest when it came to unique artistry that somehow felt completely timeless.
And all of this came at a time when they could have just as easily coasted off the success of the remarkable Rubber Soul, a record many celebrate as the moment when everything completely shifted for modern music. After all, before this, people weren’t aware that a record could be a fully-fledged piece of material in its own right, much less one they actually wanted to listen to and pick apart piece by piece until it was as much a part of them as humanly possible.
But, being the band that they were, they were never really keen on staying in one place for too long, and so Revolver – as John Lennon teased in 1966 – was an ‘anything goes’ affair with a “very different” style to anything they’d put out before. For better or worse, their sights were set on reaching even further into the abyss and coming out the other side with music that reimagined everything rock ‘n’ roll could ever be.
One of the most beautiful things about the record is that, back then, but maybe even more so today, it keeps you questioning what exactly it is that you’re listening to. It’s a challenging listen, still, but one that feels comforting all the same, like somehow the band reached into the minds of their audience, extracted some of their weirdest and most far-out dreams (and nightmares), and patched them together into something that both makes complete sense and feels entirely nonsensical.
Sean Ono Lennon went through similar motions when he heard the record, once telling Uncut that the reason it feels so mind-blowing and remains untouchable is that the band “were moving at an unbelievable speed” and “they’d hit their stride as individuals and were claiming their power as artists”.
He also compared the experience of listening to the album to “bursting through a door”, and credited ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ with “the birth of psychedelic music”. Of course, there’s a personal reason for Sean’s love for his father’s creation, namely, how he thought ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ was about the simple act of wanting to sleep more as a child.
But mainly, this, along with others like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, demonstrated how limitless the band’s talents and motivations were, as well as how “powerful” his father was when it came to genius songwriting. In his eyes, Revolver proved that Lennon “could achieve all this with just a couple of chords, a cool lyric and a great melody.” A true testament to how he helped to capture lightning in a bottle.
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