‘Rain’: The Beatles song from the future?
There’s a clear moment in The Beatles’ history when the Fab Four shifted from straightforward pop stars to true innovators. It marked a point where they redefined what studio recording could do and bridged the gap between psychedelia and mainstream appeal.
On what is my favourite Beatles album, Revolver, the band set to close out the album in jubilant style with ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, a song so poppy and joyful that even the conservative parents of 1960s obsessed fans couldn’t help but wobble their hips and click their fingers. But just as the last note struck and those parents were about to usher the words “they aren’t so bad after all”, the band stuck it into reverse gear in a bid to raise eyebrows completely off heads.
The band slammed into reverse with album closer ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, a track shaped by John Lennon’s LSD-fuelled curiosity and built around a backwards guitar solo. It shattered the usual studio playbook, proving their creativity wasn’t confined to structure or tradition. This was something else entirely: chaotic, fearless, and teetering on the edge of total disarray—in the best possible way.
The band had entered a new checkpoint of songwriting, and once through the door, a whole realm of possibilities awaited. While we would largely see the fruits of this change on their 1967 follow-up album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the boys were sure to inject this new-found technique of reverse recording on whatever Revolver song could host it.
“It was the first time I discovered [backward music],” Lennon told Rolling Stone in a 1968 interview. But it was on a Revolver B-side where Lennon discovered the technique that would later be used on the game-changing ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ “On the end of Rain you hear me singing it backwards,” he said. “We’d done the main thing at EMI and the habit was then to take the songs home and see what you thought a little extra gimmick or what the guitar piece would be”.
“So I got home about five in the morning, stoned out of me head,” Lennon remembered. “I staggered up to me tape recorder and I put it on, but it came out backwards, and I was in a trance in the earphones, what is it — what is it?” he said. “So we tagged [the backwards part] on the end. I just happened to have the tape the wrong way round, it just came out backwards, it just blew me mind.”
When the melody is given licence to explore the most far-away ideas possible, it puts pressure on the rhythm section to give it some modesty. Without a coherent tempo, these ideas could easily descend into outright chaos and it therefore put a large amount of pressure of Ringo Starr. But while he remained within the conventions of normal time structures, the looseness of the idea allowed him to explore new techniques of his own.
“My favourite piece of me is what I did on Rain,” Starr reflected in 1984. “I think I just played amazing. I was into the snare and hi-hat. I think it was the first time I used the trick of starting a break by hitting the hi-hat first instead of going directly to a drum off the hi-hat.
“I think it’s the best out of all the records I’ve ever made. ‘Rain’ blows me away. It’s out in left field. I know me and I know my playing… and then there’s ‘Rain’.”
Starr is often overlooked when accrediting the essence of The Beatles’ innovation but to relative unfairness. Of course, Lennon and McCartney fearlessly took the band into new realms, but without Starr, you’d have to argue that the allure of nonsense could have quite easily overcome what is now considered groundbreaking experimentalism.
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