The Beatles song John Lennon called “pure”
The Beatles were and are many things – powerful, psychedelic, blazing, but perhaps innocent wasn’t one of them. For all they never stopped producing anything short of an army’s worth of massive hits over their tenure, and sent the world into mania in their wake, they did so by indulging themselves in their fair share of controversy, and never shying away from pushing hard-set boundaries.
That said, part of the charm was that you could hardly ever catch them admitting it. ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ really being about LSD? Never. Hiding a plethora of backmasked messages across their discography to send subliminal words to the devil? Wouldn’t dream of it. The thing was, in an age of psychedelic uncertainties and mysterious allure, the Fab Four knew exactly how to feed into the conspiracy, and often, their protestations of innocence fell flat.
As such, when John Lennon tried to call any Beatles song “pure,” you must take it with a pinch of salt. However, that’s exactly how he decided to brand the song ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ from Sgt Pepper and the Lonely Hearts Club Band, written by himself and Paul McCartney inspired by a 19th century circus poster. He said in 1980: “It’s all just from that poster. The song is pure, like a painting. A pure watercolour.”
In a fairly lucid sense, Lennon claimed the lyrics to the song came simply naturally from the contents of the poster depicting an acrobat above a list of the circus’s performers. Taking inspiration from these names, the writer noted in 1967 that: “’Mr. Kite’ was a straight lift. I had all the words staring me in the face one day when I was looking for a song. It was from this old poster I’d bought at an antique shop. We’d been down to Surrey or somewhere filming a piece. There was a break, and I went into this shop and bought an old poster advertising a variety show which starred Mr. Kite.”
He explained, “Look, there’s the bill – with Mr. Kite topping it. I hardly made up a word, just connecting the lists together. Word for word, really,” but within this, there was one certain character who caused a bit of a stir. One ‘Henry the Horse’ garnered The Beatles a usual drug-infused suspicion from their sceptics, claiming that the name bore a remarkable resemblance to slang terms used to refer to heroin.
As with many similar offenders of the period, this supposed allusion roundly got the song banned by the BBC, despite Lennon’s later protestations in 1972 that: “The story that Henry the Horse meant ‘heroin’ was rubbish.” Whether you choose to side with his claims to purity or agree that this was just the latest in the band’s famously sly drug references, it’s clear that ‘Mr Kite’ caused some pretty murky waters.
Nevertheless, the circus is a perfect allegory for the raucous rock journey that The Beatles went on, regardless of whether it ended with the tent going up in flames. In many ways, the web of conspiracy and lore was what made them the biggest band in the world just as much as the music – but if you still believe John Lennon was “pure”, then frankly you’ll believe anything.
